I was of late in the precincts of a university campus and overheard the following pleonasm from a young woman in response to the question: “How do you like it here?”
“I, really, personally, never really, like, had, like, any issues.”
Now, I’m providing a report about how language is used these days. The extreme descriptivist might say that all language usage is acceptable. No holds barred! If a young person wants to use a swarm of words to say what can be said in a select few, let it be.
But the prescriptivist has a point. The 10-word utterance is expressible in five:
“I’ve never had a problem.”
Moreover, the claim ought to be expressed in five (or at least more succinctly than 10) since the pleonasm is unsatisfactory. The five words that were cut from the team should have been cut. They were doing no work.
No sweat!