The Awful English Language

So over on a Michigan sports blog I read, a writer used the clause, "...and it very didn't work."  I don't want to talk about the part where that's terrible English, grammatically speaking.  I want to point out the fact that it makes sense.  Not only that, not only do we understand exactly what it means, the fact is English is flexible enough that - once the grammar nazis like me get over the incorrectness of it all - it barely sounds odd.  You could make a somewhat plausible argument, in fact, that this linguistic atrocity has a connotation otherwise unobtainable with a correct construction like "...didn't work at all."  The use of the "very" adds a punch, an almost active not-working, to our idea of what happened.  It is a phrase one could use, say, of bureaucratic excess or some of the goofier stunts attempted by the proverbial frat boys.

Of course, I'm still a linguistic snob at heart.  If I saw that construction used, outside dialogue, in anything more high-falutin' than a newspaper editorial, I'd have a panic attack.  But since it was just a blog post... hey, I can admire the rhetorical effect.