No, snakespirit, don’t go yet - I have to tell you that I agree with you. Maybe the example you used in your OP wasn’t the best one, but I agree with the spirit of the OP wholeheartedly. Sloppy language indicates sloppy thinking, as far as I am concerned. The rest of the clowns in this thread may be perfectly content with almost communicating their ideas, but not me. I admire precise language, both written and verbal, and aspire to being precise myself.
As my English degree husband just explained to me, absolute terms are like infinity. You can have degrees up to infinity (almost perfect, most unique), but you can’t have terms over infinity - more perfect, better than the best.
I just can’t resist piling in on this thread. I tend not to bother correcting people’s minor grammar and spelling mistakes on message boards, for two reasons:
I’ve been known to make mistakes myself.
People end up thinking you’re an asshole if you make a habit of it.
But if there’s one thing more annoying than a grammar nit-picker, it’s a grammar nit-picker who hasn’t a clue what he or she is talking about. If you’re going to start a whole thread telling people that a particular aspect of their usage “doesn’t do anything except show how stupid [they] are,” then it might help if you’ve done a little bit of homework and know what the fuck you’re talking about.
And accusations of stupidity and grammatical ignorance look a bit hollow coming from someone whose OP contains the following paragaph:
Last time i looked, my friend, “unique” was not a noun.
Coming soon to a Pit near you: minty green’s thread on subject-verb agreement!
Just my luck Snakespirit would bug out before I could nag him on this.
I have to disagree with you on this one. Universals are indeed absolute, but how are we to describe something that comes close to being a universal but isn’t?
Otherwise, I’m with you. Locutions such as “partially destroyed” are noisome.
Whilst we’re in the linguistic bitch mode: I’m bothered by needlessly redundant phrases like “dead body.” Seems to me that, in the context of a murder investigation, the body in question is always a dead 'un. So whenever some local TV noozace says “dead body,” I yell at the screen the even more redundant “the liveless body of a dead corpse!”
Too bad your husband has no understanding of mathematics. Infinities DO come bigger than one another - there is an infinite number of integers, but the infinite number of real numbers is bigger. What’s more, the phrase “almost infinite”, in mathematical contexts, is meaningless. If you’re describing a finite quantity, there are an infinite number of quantities even greater.
See, that’s the problem when you apply the rules of things like logic or math to language - you end up with nonsensical results. And both language and math are far more complex than folks who aren’t familiar with them seem to realize. So if you’re trying to use logic or math to justify a particular language rule, you’re probably misapplying the logical or mathematical principle in question - you’re using it according to its use in common speech, not according to its technical definition.
If you have a problem with a language usage, argue it on its own terms. Explain in the context of linguistics why a usage doesn’t work. And if you can’t do that, you have no more business arguing language than I do picking fights over quantum physics. Language isn’t math, it isn’t logic, and it certainly isn’t ever going to conform to the dictates of the brigade of fourth grade teachers who go around screaming at us not to split infinitives or end sentences with prepositions.
The whole point of modifiers is to modify the meaning of the word. So ‘almost unique’ is a valid term meaning ‘one of a few of a kind’ or ‘few of a kind’ or, only a few like it.
And ‘totally uniqie’ serves to re-enforce the meaning. It is admittedly not necesary but the English language is enriched by logically unnecesary words. That’s what adjectives are.
Admitting the error doesn’t make his OP any less ridiculous or assholish. He called people stupid for correct usage. If he were smart, rather than wade in with the jackboots, he would have phrased the post in the form of a question, something like: “Hey, i always thought that the phrase ‘almost unique’ was meaningless. Is this right?”
And even his admission of error contained its own measure of ignorance: he says that this perfectly correct usage “still bugs the shit out of me.” Well, you’ll have to excuse us if our facility for the English language annoys you.
I should have been clearer in saying that they do not describe conditions in the way that the OP was intimating. I should have noted the distinction, and the ability of certain nouns, most particularly abstract nouns, to act as descriptors. I apologize for the error.
FWIW, i don’t consider myself a prescriptivist. I admire Bryan Garner, whose Dictionary of Modern American Usage walks a well-balanced line between the breast-beating prescriptivists who would deny us the ability to modify language at all, and the mindless descriptivists who would have us believe that as long some moron, somewhere, adopts a particular type of usage, then it must be fine.
I tend to regard language pragmatically, and judge its usage by two standards:
Objectively, does it appear to accomplish what the speaker (writer, signer, etc.) intends to accomplish? Usually this means, does the speaker successfully communicate his thoughts with his intended audience without annoying the audience? But sometimes a speaker intends to express rather than communicate; in such a case, gibberish is perfectly successful.
Subjectively, does it piss me off? I may not be Bush’s intended audience when he goes on about Nukular weaponry: I ain’t gonna vote for him nohow. It still cheeses me off to hear him, though.
The first standard is far more important, and it leds to my slight prescriptivist concessions: often you’re writing in a formal arena, where in order to improve communication, folks agree on the Rules of the Game. Although there’s no particularly good reason why it should be a nonrestrictive clause that’s set off with commas instead of a restrictive clause, that’s the rule, and if everyone follows it, it keeps the language working better. If you choose not to write in the formal arena, that’s your choice, but be aware that some audiences will understand you less readily; even if they do understand you, they may get annoyed with you.
But issues like “more unique” are just stupid. They’re an effort on folks’ part to FIND something to get annoyed about; indeed, removing “more unique” from the language would reduce its efficacy at communication rather than improving it.
For example, Spirits on the River is a unique restaurant, inasmuch as it’s the only one in Asheville that serves Native American cuisine. Diners aux Flambes, however, is more unique, inasmuch as it’s the only restaurant in the world that sets diners on fire with blowtorches hidden in the chairs.
The thought expressed here is perfectly clear, I trust. Holding me up on a technicality of oversimplified Aristotelian logic serves neither the speaker nor the audience, but rather serves only the shaky ego of a tremulous grammar cop.
Grammar cops, interestingly, are not my audience. I do not care if I piss them off. I care only if I communicate my thoughts clearly to folks who understand the general rules of standard English.
