I think the word you were looking for was "metaphorically".
The judges would also have accepted "figuratively". Or just omit the adverb entirely, since it's merely being used for amplification and adds no content of its own.
That said, 1) "literally" is now widely used to mean "figuratively", and is by no means the only word in English with antithetical meanings (consider e.g. "wear"). While I too dislike this particular use, the ship has clearly sailed; we can complain about it, but we're not going to stop it. And 2), the use of "literally" for emphasis with no particular meaning beyond that seems to have been adopted into writing from speech, where it served much the same purpose as interjections and fillers - to convey a bit of tone while giving the speaker a bit more time to articulate the next phrase. Used this way, it's just padding that isn't meant to mean anything. So the real problem, insofar as there is one, is people writing in a manner that too closely resembles their speech, rather than taking more time to compose and edit. It's almost as if those posting a remark online have something better they should be doing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
