For example, you walk "over" to someone, not "up" to someone, unless you are walking up a hill or whatever.
Minor quibble. "Walk up to someone" is perfectly standard English, and there's nothing wrong with it. "Up" is just not being used literally in that case, just like it's not being used literally when you "mess up". This probably won't mean anything to most people but the place you go "up" to is a focal point of some sort. The "up to" implies that the place/person you're going to is important in the discourse. (This is consistent with phrases like - looking up to someone, someone being high-up, climbing up the corporate ladder, etc, but it's not quite the same phenomenon).
Ok ok, maybe it's grammatical; is it useful?
I say yes.
"Walk over" and "Walk up to" have different connotations. When you walk over to someone who is, say, painting, you could just want to look at what they're working on. If you walk up to them, you want to talk to them, or otherwise interact with them.
So.
1) I walked over to him and looked at his painting.
That's fine, but:
2) I walked over to him and smacked him in the face.
This seems distinctly weird to me, unless the relationship is such that smacking the person in the face is a casual action. Whereas:
3) I walked up to him and looked at his painting.
Very odd, why not just walk up to the painting?
But
4) I walked up to him and smacked him in the face.
Perhaps a bit bland for the action, but if your narrator dampens affect, it might well be the right phrasing.
Right, back to the regularly scheduled directionals. (Which I personally like unless they're redundant.)
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