Below is a link to the post where I talk about it. Briefly, it’s a quotation from David Hume writing a history of England in 1806: “He had the singular fate of dying literally of hunger” (about halfway down my post). IIRC, some poster(s) there disagreed with me, but it seemed to me, especially in the context in which McWhorter cites this, that it could be perceived either literally (actual starvation) or metaphorically (that the writer lived and died in great poverty).
As a matter of fact, the context in which McWhorter provides the quote seems to make it clear that he himself believes it to be figurative. He goes on to add that “the purely figurative usage is hardly novel, either: the sentence I literally coined money was written by Fanny Kemble in 1863. Kemble, a British stage actress, hardly considered herself a slangy sort of person.” Yet if you look at the full context of the Hume quote, it’s clear that it was meant literally.