See, that sounds weird also. 'Much sugar'; 'much water'... It sounds odd to hear 'much' by itself I suppose. If it were 'very much' or 'that much'. My default would be to say 'I have a lot of sugar' instead of 'I have much sugar'. Heck, I could even tolerate 'I don't have much sugar'. So once again, it boils down to '[verb] + much', and it must just be the lack of euphony for my auditory palate.

I think my problem may be 'much' being coupled with a plural noun (stuff in this case referring to 'tv shows'), in which case my brain is expecting 'many'. Obviously you wouldn't say 'many stuff', but I think that I'm still thinking of 'stuff' as 'shows' in my mind. Does that make sense?

Yes, directly replacing programs on television (sorry for leaving that out).
I suppose it probably is the complete lack of euphony that is bugging me.

I started on the comments, but tl;dnr...
Going to add my two cents anyways (and chalk it up to adding more weight to this side of the debate... yeah, that). ;)
Length aside, I would remove 'up' entirely since you have upstairs, and also delete the second 'back' since it, too, sounds redundant...
"And back to his room upstairs would go little bastard, to his beloved stories..."
(also, aren't you supposed to not start a sentence with 'and'?)

Or, 'we might could do that'.

"People take grammar too seriously." um, isn't that kind of the point here? ;)

WW: I stand corrected. Both of your examples make sense (and I would read them that way. Thanks for the semicolons; they help readability). Your last sentence is something I don't think many have learned. I was always taught to read something out loud (or at least 'aloud in my head') to determine it's syntactical integrity. However, I believe one must first know the rules and how to apply them in order for this strategy to work. Plenty of people write things how they think it should sound, but lack the foundation of any sense of proper English or any sort of rules. Thus we get offenses such as are apparent all over the internet as well as the many infiltrating public and business publications (at least in America).

True, I'm American (guilty, sadly).
What you say makes perfect sense. In my head I think 'starved - to starve due to an imposed restriction of food; starving - beyond hungry'. The second being something that could be self-imposed, or simply due to busy-ness or the like.
Thanks for the culture lesson :)

WW, I'm confused by your post (not the last one you made, but the one before that).
You say that -worthy words are mostly based on nouns, and yet two of your examples are verbs. I could see praise as a noun, however praiseworthy suggests worthy of praise (the action of praising) and I can hardly think of cringe as a noun.
As an aside, I've never heard anyone use airworthy (though it's meaning is clear to me) but seaworthy is much more common to my ear. Of course, I also live in a coastal area ;)

sigurd: it's true, if you re-read njtt's post; he's not saying that you can't make up words. he's saying you can't make up words AND expect them to be readily and widely accepted or understood. Though I side with you that certain affixes can themselves be quite easily identified and understood. I have not thus far seen any word that doesn't immediately make sense. Then again, I'm also not one to say things like 'must of' and I also know the difference between their and there (something I can't say of about 80% of my friends... oi).

English: the only world language that causes confusion between two different people speaking the same words ;)

Yes, widely in America herb is pronounced 'erb'. A silent h in hotel, however, I have never heard.
In any case, I don't hear much h dropping, but I had seen 'an' before h words in print in old English manuscripts, and it was the cause of much bother for me.