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Abuse of English

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the language, not the people.

This is the first of an infrequent series dedicated to rants about abuse of the English language :-)

The topic today is the word ‘unique’.

Unique means the only one of its type in the world, unlike any other. So it follows that the property of uniqueness is either true or false. There can be no degrees of uniquity. Either a thing is unique or it isn’t.

Please don’t describe something as ‘fairly unique’ or ‘extremely unique’. You may wish to substitute the word ‘unusual’ in these cases; ‘fairly unusual’ or ‘extremely unusual’.

When people use degrees of uniqueness whilst speaking to me, I normally have to interrupt them to explain that ‘unique’ is a boolean quality; that is, it is either true or false, with no grey areas in between.

Comments 2

  1. wallaceprime wrote:

    Maybe it would be worth defining a fuzzy logic version of unique: euneek, perhaps? Appropriately rhyming with geek, the pair of e’s could represent, in hexadecimal of course, the degree of uniqueness: from zero (00) to 255 (ee). Thus, euneek would be fully unique (maximum value of 255), with the lower end of the uniqueness scale of utter commonality beeing represented by eun00k (minimum value of zero, 00).
    Wally

    Posted 02 Jan 2008 at 21:21
  2. wallaceprime wrote:

    Maybe it would be worth defining a fuzzy logic version of unique: euneek, perhaps? Appropriately rhyming with geek, the pair of e’s could represent, in hexadecimal of course, the degree of uniqueness: from zero (00) to 255 (ee). Thus, euneek would be fully unique (maximum value of 255), with the lower end of the uniqueness scale of utter commonality being represented by eun00k (minimum value zero, 00).

    Wally

    Posted 02 Jan 2008 at 21:23

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