In previous blogs where I've deplored the systematic wasting of words, I've considered well established usages such as those irritating superfluous 'do's'
'Meet up with' on the other hand, appeared quite recently, probably within the last twenty years and certainly in my lifetime.
Some people are very clumsy with words, so it is not surprising that someone somewhere should have said 'meet up with', but I'm puzzled that so many others should have adopted such an abomination instead of recoiling in horror.
Are they trying to say something that is not said by 'meet'?
To say 'meet up' suggests that one is excluding meeting in other directions. What would it be like to meet down, or sideways, and if those are possible, why does no-one do them ? What possibility is 'with' supposed to exclude ?
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Hmm. "Visit with" is I think a reasonably old Americanism for "visit", so I suppose "meet with" is either as old or has been formed by analogy, a kind of linguistic atmospheric pressure. "Meet up" in British English has always to me seemed to imply something purposeful, as opposed to the possibility of an accidental meeting; "simple "meet" in this regard being neutral on that point. "Up" is a kind of intensifier: compare "listen up" with just "listen".
Of course, due to the constraints of English syntax, "meet up" can't take a person as a direct object (compare "*we met up Henry", "we met up the Eiffel Tower"), so once you are commited to use the up-formulation you are pretty much commited to using "with" to indicate who you met.
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