'Literally' can never mean 'figuratively'
The core idea stands, but key numbers or details have changed.
Taught'Literally' means actually, in fact, without exaggeration. Saying "I literally died" is a mistake, because you did not.
NowMerriam-Webster added the intensifier sense in 2013, and the OED has recorded it since 2011, noting use since 1769. Dictionaries describe how words are used rather than legislating how they should be, and this use is 250 years old.
What actually happened
The 2013 announcement produced a small cultural meltdown, with people declaring the dictionary had surrendered and the language was over. The dictionary had done what dictionaries do. Merriam-Webster's lexicographers pointed out that the sense had been in their unabridged edition since 1909, and the OED's entry cites usage back to 1769.
The writers involved are inconvenient for the purists. Charles Dickens used it this way in Nicholas Nickleby. So did Mark Twain, Charlotte Brontë, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. This is not an innovation by careless teenagers, it is a long-standing rhetorical intensifier employed by canonical novelists.
The pattern is also completely routine in English. "Really" and "truly" and "very" all began as words asserting truth and drifted into pure emphasis; "very" descends from the Latin for true, and nobody objects to "very tired." It is called semantic bleaching, and it happens to intensifiers reliably. 'Literally' is simply the one that got caught doing it in front of a generation that had been taught it was sacred.
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Sources
- Merriam-Webster: Did We Change the Definition of 'Literally'?merriam-webster.com
- Oxford English Dictionary: literally, adv.oed.com
Who was taught this
Still standard through 2013, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2013 learned the earlier version.