An autistic woman is reportedly reconsidering some of the answers she gave in her diagnostic assessment three years ago, in light of startling new information about what the word ‘literally’ means.

Lottie Fitzgerald, 25, was diagnosed as autistic in 2023, but has since realised that she is even more autistic than anyone knew at the time, due to her expectation that people will say what they mean instead of saying something else entirely.

“I know that when John Donne wrote that no man is an island, he didn’t just mean it in the sense that no man is a zebra or a spaghetti bolognaise, because you can’t be one of those things and a man at the same time,” she said. “He meant that we’re all connected to one another, like a giant continental land mass, only made of skin and organs.”

“So, naturally, when the psychologist asked if I have a tendency to take things literally, I said no.”

“Since then, I’ve realised that when someone says, ‘We should meet up for a coffee soon,’ they don’t actually want to meet you for socialising with a caffeinated beverage in the near future. What they actually mean is: ‘I wish to end this interaction in a friendly manner, goodbye.’ That’s why, if you then contact them to arrange the coffee date, it gets really awkward, really fast. God, people are shits, aren’t they?”

Fitzgerald hurried to clarify that she didn’t mean every single person ever to live, and that those people she did mean are only figuratively, not literally, shits.

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