One of the classic battles prescriptive grammarians fight is that "You did good." is grammatically wrong, while "You did well." is correct. The justification for this is that "well" is a legitimate adverb but "good" is not. But as a native English speaker I cannot think of a single other case where "You did [adverb]." does not sound very obviously wrong in a similar environment, apart from synonyms and antonyms of "well".
From a grammatical standpoint "do" is either a transitive verb or an auxiliary verb. In "You did good.", "good" is the direct object (a noun), while "well" can only be an adverb. The only times when "do" is ever used without a main verb or direct object is in cases of deletion of a predicate that was stated immediately prior, e.g. "I didn't do it, but he did" or "I didn't go, but he did". I cannot think of any other cases where it is grammatically correct to use "do" without a main verb or direct object, and in such environments adverbs are never used because these are cases of deletion of the predicate. Yet if you were to say "You did good/well." it would almost invariably be in an environment where the predicate was not stated immediately prior.
Is it possible that prescriptive grammarians are simply wrong, and that ages of this prescription has made this particular case sound acceptable despite being a grammatical structure that is otherwise obviously wrong?
EDIT: Since this is a topic that is coming up in comments in multiple places, I'll put it here. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/do meaning 2 describes "do well" under the heading "Act or behave in a specified way". We might then suppose that the rule is not that "do" requires a main verb or direct object as I state above, but rather requires a complement which specifies what is done or how (which could be an adverb or adverbial phrase). This implies that any adverb describing manner should work in the phrase "You did [adverb]". How then do we account for the fact that most adverbs that are not a synonym or antonym of "well" (e.g. quickly, solemnly, angrily, etc.) do not sound grammatical in such a context?
Best Answer
I can think of lots of instances where "to do" is used as an intransitive verb, e.g. "He did as he was told to do". "He did well" is impeccable English. "He did good" would work if you meant "He did good rather than evil". To use "good" as an adverb is not standard English.