'Exact same' is crazy! Not that the speaker shouldn't be mortified -- the other girl might look better in it -- but 'exact same' doesn't mean what the speaker thinks it does.
Why? Because 'same' means identical in every conceivable way, that you cannot ever distinguish a difference between two 'same' objects no matter what advanced technology or possible philosophical parsing you employ. It's like saying '2 is the same as 2', an absolute identity.
'Exact', on the other hand, doesn't express sameness. It's synonymous with 'accurate' and 'precise'. We use these three words to say how closely something adheres to a measurement or resembles another thing or model, an approximation to some finite degree, however big or small, like a toy train compared to a real one, or a forged painting compared to the real masterpiece.
"That toy train looks exactly like the real thing!" "That forgery looks exactly like the original!"
But the toy train and the forgery are ultimately always found to be not the same as the original, even if they're exactly like the original, get it? It's obvious with the toy train: it's a lot smaller. But it's also obvious with the forgery if you have the right technology and experience to observe the minute differences.
So adding the word 'exact' to the word 'same' in the 'exact same' meme, dilutes the sameness of the comparison being made, it doesn't enhance it, because 'same' is the ultimate statement of identity between two ideas or objects, on which there is no possible improvement.
Some people seem to sense the craziness of this linguistic meme but attempt to fix it by getting rid of the wrong element, by chucking 'same' and saying, "This girl was wearing the exact dress I was!"
That totally has no meaning, dawg! She (or he) is trying to talk about 'sameness' but has eliminated the only word in the meme that expresses sameness, leaving only the word that indicates approximation.
You wouldn't say, 'I was driving the exact car yesterday', would you?
You are not alone - there truly are people out there who, like you, care about things like this. The have-not's gripe about the "1%" but how many European monks, how many Arabic scholars in the 6th Century were there who kept glowing the flickering wisp of knowledge?
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