Okay, before you get involved, reexamine what he said, reexamine what I said, and then try to spot the logical misstep in what you’re presenting here. You stepped into the middle of me asking him a question but you don’t seem to know what I was asking. He appeared to have made a statement with slightly circular reasoning, and I asked him what he meant.
At any rate, WTF were those lexicographers smoking? “Up” is being used in their example to mark that an action has been completed, not that it’s particularly intense. As in, “eat up”, which clearly signifies that whatever was eaten, was eaten in its entirety. I could be persuaded that “up” is used as an intensifier for “hurry”, but that’s certainly not what goes on with “type”.
I’d say up, in both of those examples, is completive, as I mentioned before. “The house burned up” suggests that the house finished burning; “I tied her up” means that I tied her securely (compare, say, “I tied her hand to the chair while she was sleeping” - from the context, you can tell she’s not tied securely, and adding “up” makes the sentence rather odd.)
The “down” is more literal - the house burned down to the ground; I tied her down and she couldn’t get up - she’s in a physically lower position. To me, “I tied her up on the cross” sounds reasonable, but “I tied her down on the cross” sounds odd.
You can come up with endless examples of apparently contradictory phrasal verbs, but it mostly becomes a game at that point: to shoot down vs to shoot up, for example. Better minds than mine have striven and failed to codify these things, and sometimes general patterns can be detected, especially with phrasal verbs with prepositions that do involve location or motion - to punch someone “in” the face vs to punch him “on” the shoulder, for example, but a counterexample can always be found to taunt you with. Hence my earlier assertion that they were a law unto themselves.
A lot of the confusion could be avoided if the preposition was avoided altogther, and just the verb used - the house burned, the plane was shot, his shoulder was punched - but English seems to like phrasal verbs, and the problem with eliminating the preposition is that many phrasal verbs are used metaphorically: “His idea was shot down” makes sense; “His idea was shot” emphatically doesn’t.
Another alternative, to substitute a different verb for the phrasal - “He boarded the train” rather than “he got on the train”, or “His idea was rejected” rather than “His idea was shot down” - falls down because the forrmer just sound too stilted, and lack the pithiness of the latter. My advice to students was always, “Don’t try to understand 'em, just learn 'em”
Nuts. I should also have mentioned that a lot of phrasal verbs are used idiomatically rather than metaphorically, so substitution or elimination becomes problematic: “Stop talking!” just doesn’t carry the same punch as “Shut up!” does.
I’m taking it as a general premise that the concrete uses of “up” in a phrasal verb predate the more abstract uses. The later uses, then are the result of (1) parallelism to related verbs, as in “drink up” and “eat up”, or (2) abstraction of the notion of “up” applied over a large number of cases.
For example, I’d bet the ealiest usages would have “up”= literally “upward”, e.g. “go up” or “move up”. It’s not a far cry from here to, say, “drink up”, since one must raise their glass upward to imbibe, and parallelism between “eat” and “drink” would likely lead to “eat up”.
More abstractly, “up” = “ahead”, adding an extra dimension to a verb like “go up” = “go forward”; parallelism then leads to “drive up” or “come up” . Even more abstractly, “up” could refer to the implied object of a verb, e.g. “cheer up”, where the “up” refers to the presumed raising of spirits; by parallelism then comes a phrase like “fire up”. I’m not saying these are the exact paths, but i think it gives an idea of how complex this evolution could be.
Eventually, “up” is found in places that seem more and more abstract, or that rely on an earlier parallelism that’s been obscured under these layers of abstraction. Each step of this path will seem like a reasonable extension of the usage, but the link between the first to the last will be difficult to see, which on face value lead us to conclude these verbs use “up” in a contradictory manner.
The proof of this would be to research which phrasal verbs have the earliest citations, and see if they have an obvious explanation. Posters here seem to be inferring “up” generally indicates an increase, but we’re doing this based on current examples only, rather than a look at the history of usage.
Note that some English speakers use “slow up” as well as “hurry up”: e.g., “The train slowed up as it approached the curve”.
We also “open up” a sink drain that is “stopped up”.
So while “up” is indeed an intensifier, it isn’t necessarily related to the absolute direction of the intensification. To “slow up” means the same thing as to “slow down”.
Which I guess has already been pretty well covered here, but I wanted to get the “slow up” example in.