Rare vocabulary and figurative predication are different matters. The earlier discussion of individual-word eloquence concerned unusual pronunciation, obscurity and morphology. The present issue concerns who is presented as performing the action.
بَنَى الْأَمِيرُ الْمَدِينَةَ
The ruler built the city.
In some settings, this means the work happened at the ruler's command or under his administration, without his physically building it. Yet broad customary usage and context matter: the utterance cannot automatically be declared rationally figurative in every use.
First establish the intended action, its attributed agent, and the evidence—linguistic convention or contextual indication—that the relation is not literal.