Oh and then there's this from another forum:
the game literally eats my cpu
That's literally not how you use the word literally.
But the word literally is literally used to mean figuratively in certain contexts. It's literally an acceptable thing to do.
And I'm not telling you if I mean literally in a figurative sense in that last sentence.
I don't think this is really it. I will readily admit that the word "literally" is now grossly overused, but when people use it like that they are not using it to literally mean "figuratively." They are merely using it in a metaphoric sense.
In the same way that when I say "my blue dog pooped a million times when I took him for a walk," I am not being literal, when I say "my blue dog literally pooped a million times when I took him for a walk," I am still not being literal, nor am I using "literally" to indicate that I am being figurative, I am just using literally in an overall figurative sentence. Now one could very well argue that using a word that literally means "not figurative" in a figurative sentence is rather unhelpful, but it does not mean that the word "literally" is literally being used to mean "figuratively."