Over in the Trivia Domino thread, a poster referred to JetBlue Airlines as being “fairly unique.”
“Unique” means one of a kind. Can it be qualified? Are the Who “sort of unique?” Is Kinky Friedman “very unique”? Was Robin Williams “incredibly unique”?
A constant in language is intensifiers. A mere statement never seems powerful enough. It must be made bigger. And how! These can be in any of a huge number of forms. Adding an adjective is possibly the most common.
Whenever back in time a group of Victorian pedants took it upon themselves to purify the language and seize it from the ranks of actual users, they laid down a gigundo number of rules that were never to be broken. One was that unique could not be intensified.
Logically, there are correct. Unique can be modified - “almost unique” is logical - but not intensified - “very unique” makes no sense.
That’s not how language works. People using colloquial language need a way to intensify words to convey the magnitude of their experience. So they use unique with illogical modifiers. This is improper in proper language. But so what? Almost none of us ever are writing proper English. And if one studies the history of “proper” English one would discover a zillion illogical expressions buried into it and sanctified by historic usage.
The Dope is not formal, BTW. It is colloquial. Basic grammar and spelling count. But loosey-goosey usage is the norm.
If it can’t be qualified, then it’s meaningless, because every macroscopic object in the Universe is unique. What good is an adjective that applies to every noun?
The Oxford English Dictionary says
They give examples of the use of modifiers going back to the 18th century, such as “in some measure unique”, “almost unique”, “…by which the Poem becomes more unique and perfect.”, “quite unique”, “very unique”.
I think there’s no point in splitting hairs about this. Unique is often used in the sense of ‘uncommon, unusual, remarkable’, as the OED mentions, and meanings and usages of words do tend to change over time.
This is what I would think. “Unique” does mean “one of a kind,” but there’s no hard-and-fast definition of what a “kind” is.
You can say something’s unique if there’s nothing else exactly like it. But if there are more things that are closer to being like it in some way than there are for some other “unique” thing, does that make it “less unique”?
Let’s move this to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
It makes no sense to not quantify it. Consider:
Going to Paris is a unique experience.
Going to the moon is also a unique experience.
Fewer people have gone to the moon, so it’s more unique.
IMHO, I’d rank the Kinkster as unique-er than Robin Williams.
English is almost unique in that it is not bound by laws. French is bound by the edict of Academie Francaise, which is a 40-member body that meets from time to time and deems what is correct in the French Language. German recently underwent a formal respelling of a number of German words, which became “correct” by order, but I understand that a lot of Germans are refusing to comply.
Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges writes only in English, lamenting that Spanish is so rigid, that “you can’t do those things in Spanish”.
Norwegian was all respelled about a hundred years ago, and Romanian now has all new spelling so I can’t even read it anymore.
Turkish switched to a different alphabet about a century ago, and Kyrgyz has changed official alphabet three times in the past century, and there is a movement to change it again. from the current Cyrillic. These things, in most countries’ national languages, can be done by formal edict.
As much as it pains me to see “very unique”, i’m afraid that train has left the station. I’d still expect a professional writer not to use that phrasing, but it’s all over the place in the vernacular. We now need a new word that means “unlike no other of its kind”.
I’m willing to live with intensifiers attached to the word unique.
I think of it numerically: 12345, 23456 and 79780 are all unique five-digit numbers, but two of them share four numbers and are portions of the same sequence. If it’s me speaking and writing, I’d rather say 79780 “has less in common” or “has more differences” but even I get lazy and fall back on “more unique” or something like that.
How do you catch a unique elephant?
Unique up on him.
I thought the question to that joke was “How do you catch a leaping elephant?”
Borges died 30 years ago this month so “writes” is the wrong tense for him, unless he is exceptionally unique.
I think you could say that going to the moon is especially unique - that is, unique in a more notable way than going to Paris. The intensifier is not actually attached to the word ‘unique’, but instead, to an implied quality of the uniqueness.
I would argue that outside of advert speak, neither is correct.
Millions go to Paris every year, many of them more than once. Twelve men have gone to the moon. So going to Paris is a common experience - enjoyable, wonderful, terrible maybe, but in no way unique. A dozen guys made it to the moon, so that’s extremely rare, but still not unique.
[ my bold ]
PTDR
I’m a little confused by this whole exchange. What does the number of visitors have to do with it? It’s the experience that is unique. Of all the the places that one could potentially go in the universe, no other place is quite like Paris.
Agreed; that seems perfectly valid.
Also (as mentioned upthread) “Almost unique.” That’s a modifier (kind of a negation, but negation is modification too) that is valid and often true.
