An issue I have with this approach is the lack of gradation.
A very clean carpet might still not be spotless nor immaculate. You'd have to adjust and go for "almost spotless", but then is it still better than using "very" ?
Forcing people to think long and hard about the exact word they want to use is beneficial, but I'd expect we'd still fall back to modulators like "very" in most cases (the same way I'm cushioning this statement to avoid going to an extreme)
> Forcing people to think long and hard about the exact word they want to use is beneficial
...except in the cases where it's not. If you want to communicate efficiently, you need to speak plainly: you will be understood and the whole process will go smoothly as you won't need to lose time to replace each 'very' in your sentence with something that might or might not fit.
A very clean carpet might still not be spotless nor immaculate. You'd have to adjust and go for "almost spotless", but then is it still better than using "very" ?
Forcing people to think long and hard about the exact word they want to use is beneficial, but I'd expect we'd still fall back to modulators like "very" in most cases (the same way I'm cushioning this statement to avoid going to an extreme)