[gwnn]

My claim is that there's no substantive difference between unusual and unique. Or are you really saying that expressions such as "this girl is unique" are incorrect, too? You can say Rafael Nadal has a unique career (can't you?) but there are other players that have careers that are at least a little bit similar. I know that philosophically you can say that only things that are completely incomparable to anything else are unique but then there are precious few things left for us to use the word for.

[kenberg]

I would like it if "unique", "very unusual", and "weird" all had different meanings. Donald Trump is weird but not unique. Being dealt a hand with a ten card suit is certainly unusual, but not unique.

I may not be able to precisely pin down the difference, but I still think that there is one. You might expect that, with these stringent restrictions, I don't often use the word "unique". I think that's true.

Take the Tom Stoppard play Travesties. The plot (I saw it long ago but I think I am right) centers around the simultaneous presence of James Joyce, Tristan Tzara (a founder of Dada, if, like me, you had no idea who this is) and Vladimir Lenin in Zurich in 1917. Stoppard takes advantage of this unique opportunity to imagine them meeting and discussing events. My understaning is that the interactions Stoppard portrays never in fact happened, but the simultaneous presence of the three main characters presents a unique opportunity for imaging how their interactions could have gone. Not a "very unique" opportunity, a "unique" opportunity.

I do think that "very unique" is weird, but it is not unusual and I don't let it bother me. As with many things I figure my effort is best put to use correcting my own grammatical shortcomings.

[blackshoe]

People tend to overuse words like unique. Why? For the greater emphasis, I think. Still, overusing words tends to degrade their usefulness in describing things that truly fit the meaning.

[GreenMan]

gwnn, on 2015-July-05, 05:54, said:

... there's no substantive difference between unusual and unique.

This is incorrect. Even when people use "unique" to mean something other than literally sui generis, it connotes a greater degree of difference or individuality than "unusual." The meaning of "unique" may be drifting away from its literal sense, but even so, no one uses them interchangeably.

As an easy example, plenty of people would say the weather where I live has been unusually mild. No one would call the recent weather unique, even loosely.

[gwnn]

Yes it's a question of degree, not a question of a completely different concept. That's all I was saying, that it's just another "7 colors of the rainbow fallacy." I'm glad we agree on that and sorry if I expressed myself unclearly (I didn't mean to write "no substantive difference" but "no fundamental difference" and I just meant that in practice when people use unique, except a few special cases, it is actually the same as "very (very) unusual") I definitely don't think unique and unusual are interchangeable in all contexts. I'm just saying that there are degrees of uniqueness and nothing truly fulfills the purist's definition of unique in practice.

Sorry, I wrote both of these posts from my phone so if my point is still unclear, I will have to blame it on my autocorrect.

[Phil]

gwnn, on 2015-July-05, 05:54, said:

My claim is that there's no substantive difference between unusual and unique. Or are you really saying that expressions such as "this girl is unique" are incorrect, too? You can say Rafael Nadal has a unique career (can't you?) but there are other players that have careers that are at least a little bit similar. I know that philosophically you can say that only things that are completely incomparable to anything else are unique but then there are precious few things left for us to use the word for.

I have the same issues with alternate versus alternative.

[y66]

gwnn, on 2015-July-05, 13:08, said:

Yes it's a question of degree, not a question of a completely different concept. That's all I was saying, that it's just another "7 colors of the rainbow fallacy." I'm glad we agree on that and sorry if I expressed myself unclearly (I didn't mean to write "no substantive difference" but "no fundamental difference" and I just meant that in practice when people use unique, except a few special cases, it is actually the same as "very (very) unusual") I definitely don't think unique and unusual are interchangeable in all contexts. I'm just saying that there are degrees of uniqueness and nothing truly fulfills the purist's definition of unique in practice.

Sorry, I wrote both of these posts from my phone so if my point is still unclear, I will have to blame it on my autocorrect.

Unique is not the same as "very (very) unusual".

From the OED:

Quote

unique, adj, Of which there is only one; one and no other; single, sole, solitary.

unusual, adj, Not usual; uncommon; exceptional.

There is no number of verys which when placed before unusual produces something that means "of which there is only one".

[barmar]

If you're going to quote from dictionaries, it's not fair to quote only the parts that support your position. Mine has a second definition:

Quote

particularly remarkable, special, or unusual : a unique opportunity to see the spectacular Bolshoi Ballet.

And this Usage Note:

Quote

For example, since the core meaning of unique (from Latin ‘one’) is ‘being only one of its kind,’ it is logically impossible, the argument goes, to submodify it: it either is ‘unique’ or it is not, and there are no stages in between. In practice, the situation in the language is more complex than this. Words like unique have a core sense but they often also have a secondary, less precise (nonabsolute) sense of 'very remarkable or unusual,' as in : a really unique opportunity.

[gwnn]

y66, I know that definition. All I am saying is that in practice, there are very few things that are somehow really truly one of a kind (where by kind I mean some group of things that are truly incomparable to any other thing). On a less pure note, if all you mean by unique is "something that is different than everything else" then almost everything is unique so the word needs gradation. For instance, I mentioned in my song example - if all songs are represented by points in a big 3D or 25D space, there will be songs that are close to a lot of songs and songs that are a bit further away but there is no fundamental difference between these two cases, just a question of degree. Let's take the first song of Elvis, and let's say that it was the first ever rock&roll song (I am a complete ignoramus about music history so please don't challenge me on these fscts, just my argument). In that case, on the day of its release, people would very justifiably call the song unique and it satisfies the definition quite well (at the time of its release, it was the only one of this kind, namely, rock&roll). But if you think about it, the only reason why people created this new category was that the song was quite far away from the other songs in this 25D space I mentioned, it was not because the song just doesn't fit at all inside it. I mean, you could reasonably expect to be able to compare this Elvis song to some other earlier songs that do sound a bit similar.

I gave a lot of examples already and I feel like I am repeating myself. The main idea is: I am unique and so is everyone else. Also, every animal is equal but some are more equal than the others. Oh and "what about adults? Isn't every adult special, too?" I will try to think of other clichés to support my view since clearly I am not doing well with my original thoughts.

[y66]

The problem is on my end. I did not read your earlier posts. Sorry. And, as barmar pointed out, the OED definition I gave is incomplete. I did scan the other definitions which seemed consistent with the one I cited. But I did not read the examples from actual usage which show that very unique has been common usage since at least 1908.

Quote

unique, adj, That is or forms the only one of its kind; having no like or equal; standing alone in comparison with others, freq. by reason of superior excellence; unequalled, unparalleled, unrivalled.

In this sense readopted from French at the end of the 18th c. and regarded as a foreign word down to the middle of the 19th, from which date it has been in very common use, with a tendency to take the wider meaning of ‘uncommon, unusual, remarkable’.

The usage in the comparative and superlative, and with advs. as absolutely, most, quite, thoroughly, totally, etc., has been objected to as tautological.

1618 W. Barclay Nature & Effects Well at King-horne sig. Avij, This is a soueraigne and vnicke remedie for that disease in Women.
1794 R. J. Sulivan View of Nature I. 3 A concentrated, and an unique aggregation of almost all the wonders of the natural world.
1809 R. K. Porter Travelling Sketches Russia & Sweden I. xxv. 285 As it was thoroughly unique, I cannot forbear presenting you with so singular a curiosity.
1842 J. P. Collier Fools & Jesters Introd. p. vi, A relic..not only unique in itself, but unprecedented in its kind.
1866 H. P. Liddon Bampton Lect. (1867) v. 368 [Christ's] relationship to the Father..is absolutely unique.
1871 B. Taylor tr. Goethe Faust II. ii. i. 105 A thing so totally unique The great collectors would go far to seek.
1885 Harper's Mag. Apr. 703/1 When..these summer guests found themselves defrauded of their uniquest recreations.
1908 K. Grahame Wind in Willows viii. 168 ‘Toad Hall,’ said the Toad proudly, ‘is an eligible self-contained gentleman's residence, very unique.’
1912 G. K. Chesterton Manalive i. iii. 86 Diana Duke..began putting away the tea things. But it was not before Inglewood had seen an instantaneous picture so unique that he might well have snapshotted it.
1939 Country Life 11 Feb. p. xviii/2 (advt.) Almost the most unique residential site along the south coast.
1960 Agric. & Vet. Chem. I. 197/2 Diquat is one of a group of quaternary dipyridylium salts which possess quite unique properties.
1980 Verbatim Autumn 15/2 A high-ranking state Alcoholic Beverage Commission official said Friday that Wednesday's retroactive renewal and transfer of the beverage permit of the rural Bloomington Liars' Lodge by the Monroe County Alcoholic Beverage Board was ‘unique but not uncommon’

[Zelandakh]

You are probably unaware but Grahame's "very unique" was a deliberate usage of bad English designed to poke fun at estate agents.

[kenberg]

Let me rif a little on the Elvis example.

The earliest Elvis song that I can recall is Mystery train. The Wik informs me that it was the B side of I forgot to remember to forget but I barely recall that while I have a strong memory of first hearing Mystery train. The opening lyrics:

Train I ride, sixteen coaches long
Train I ride, sixteen coaches long
Well that long black train got my baby and gone.


Well.
I understood the lyrics to How much is that doggy in the window. But this?
I took it to be about death. Later lyrics in the song perhaps cast doubt on this.

So, unique? I doubt I would say so. But my mind wandered a bit. Mystery train is also a Jim Jarmusch film set in Memphis. Which of course reminded me of the first Jarmusch film I saw, Stranger than Paradise. You want unique? That's unique.

OK, so my criterion for usage may not be precise. But try this: I only use "unique" in a case where I cannot imagine putting "very' in front of "unique".


Incidentally, I have no problem with "absolutely unique". I take this to mean "You may think I am using 'unique' loosely, as just being unusual. No, I said 'unique' and i meant unique. If I meant unusual I would have said unusual" So I see "absolutely unique" as an effort to prevent a mis-interpretation, not as a way of saying "even more unique than usual".

[gwnn]

So if that film is unique, in what way is it unique? Does it really literally belong to no category of film at all? I've never heard of it and am resisting the urge to open its IMDb page but I assume it has connections to other films, it has been influenced by and influenced other films as well. Am I wrong about that? I think it's just a figure of speech even in the "first sense": much like me calling my wife* the most beautiful woman on Earth, I am not describing something about the film per se but about how it makes me feel (she makes me feel like she was the most beautiful, the film makes me feel like there is no other film in its genre). I'm struggling to find a usage of unique that is not about some integer or whatever that does not boil down to a certain kind of unusualness (something that truly has no basis of comparison to anything else). Again, once we get to the prosaic definition of "anything is unique that has different attributes than all other objects," then in real life just about everything is unique. So I assume that we are talking about "nothing else can be compared to it, even in principle."

*-sorry, my wife doesn't exist! it was just another one of my stupid examples

This post has been edited by gwnn: 2015-July-07, 16:36

[kenberg]

gwnn, on 2015-July-07, 13:14, said:

So if that film is unique, in what way is it unique? Does it really literally belong to no category of film at all? I've never heard of it and am resisting the urge to open its IMDb page but I assume it has connections to other films, it has been influenced by and influenced other films as well. Am I wrong about that? I think it's just a figure of speech even in the "first sense": much like me calling my wife the most beautiful woman on Earth, I am not describing something about the film per se but about how it makes me feel (she makes me feel like she was the most beautiful, the film makes me feel like there is no other film in its genre). I'm struggling to find a usage of unique that is not about some integer or whatever that does not boil down to a certain kind of unusualness (something that truly has no basis of comparison to anything else). Again, once we get to the prosaic definition of "anything is unique that has different attributes than all other objects," then in real life just about everything is unique. So I assume that we are talking about "nothing else can be compared to it, even in principle."

First things first. Congratulations on your marriage, it's the first I heard of it. And to the most beautiful woman on Earth, no less. Best wishes to her. Tradition has it that we congratulate the man, and offer best wishes to the woman. A sexist tradition no doubt, but you can probably see the point.

As to exactly why I would say that that film is unique, I have come to think that my criterion is pretty good: I use the word "unique" only when I would not consider modifying it to "very unique", even if it were grammatically acceptable. I realize this will not suffice for those wishing the meaning to be pinned down precisely.

I recommend the film if you get a chance to see it. I saw it when it came out 30 years or so ago, I haven't seen it since, maybe I would wonder what on Earth I saw in it (this happens) but I recall just being completely surprised by it. I had never heard of the director before, it may have been his first film, I found it to be wonderfully creative. Of course after this sales pitch it could never live up to expectations. I suppose part of being unique is that I would not describe it as "Oh, it was sort of like ...". It wasn't sort of like ..., however you fill in the dots. At least not with what I had seen before. Another approach: I saw it in Chicago. There are only a few films that, after 30 years, I can tell you where I saw it and with whom (in this case, my older daughter. I also saw Rocky with my daughter on New year's eve, the year it came out.) . I saw The Caine Mutiny in Duluth in 1954 with Roger Lynn, although this memory may be vivid more because Roger and I were on our own on a road trip. Caine was good, but not unique. I might call Rocky unique. The first and last watchable movie Stallone made.

I am not trying to sound like Humpty-Dumpty, "words mean precisely what I choose them to mean". Words have meaning, but conversation is not a legal document. For me, unique is not unusual or very unusual or very very very unusual. It's unique. You can place as many "very"s as you want in front of unusual, but there is simply no need to place any in front of "unique". I see the distinction as meaningful, even if it cannot be pinned down exactly.



Anyway, I have no real ax to grind one way or another, so I will rest with the claim that I only use "unique" when "very unique" would sound wrong to me.

[ArtK78]

I am late to the "unique' discussion, which upsets me as the misuse of the word "unique" is a pet peeve of mine.

"Unique" cannot be modified. Something either is unique or it is not unique. There is no "more unique," "less unique" or "very unique." "Truly unique" is pointless, as something either is or it is not unique. I could go on, but I keep coming back to the same statement - something either is or is not unique - there is no middle ground, no comparatives, no modifications.

As for every object being unique on a molecular or atomic or even a subatomic level, that is reductio ad absurdum. Of course every physical object is unique in some respect. But that is meaningless.

[gwnn]

Before I go on with my circular sophistry, I should clarify that my wife, as many of my examples in this thread, is a hypothetical.

[Fluffy]

Still with commercials. this time on the radio, there is a series of the same security company on every channel I listen to. To announce their alarm system they create fake testimonies of people that suposedly have had their house robbed.

Many commercials sell you sex, or a happy life. This one sells fear, I don't know the exact definition of terrorism, but for my understanding of the word, this company is commiting terrorist acts.

[gwnn]

ArtK78, on 2015-July-07, 15:55, said:

I am late to the "unique' discussion, which upsets me as the misuse of the word "unique" is a pet peeve of mine.

"Unique" cannot be modified. Something either is unique or it is not unique. There is no "more unique," "less unique" or "very unique." "Truly unique" is pointless, as something either is or it is not unique. I could go on, but I keep coming back to the same statement - something either is or is not unique - there is no middle ground, no comparatives, no modifications.

As for every object being unique on a molecular or atomic or even a subatomic level, that is reductio ad absurdum. Of course every physical object is unique in some respect. But that is meaningless.

Great, but what is a unique thing then? I kept asking for an example of something that is unique in some other sense than "very different from all the other stuff."

I have probably explained this 5 times in this thread with no success whatsoever so let me try for the sixth time (why not? it's not like I have a thesis to finish.)

A is unique = A is one of its kind.
OK, what is a kind?
kind = stuff lumped together that are sufficiently alike and sufficiently different from other stuff that it merits the definition of a separate category (like a musical genre, or a category of car, or an animal species, ...).
OK let's put it together:
A is unique=A is sufficiently different from everything else that it merits the definition of a separate
category for itself. Nothing else is sufficiently close to A to fit in.

Did you notice how many times I used "sufficiently?" That's a gradation. You can move your criteria of how alike/different stuff need to be to be in/out of these "kinds" so it is all relative.

For example, let's just say, we are talking about heights for the sake of simplicity (so there is only 1 number), and we freeze time, so no one is growing or shrinking while we measure everybody, let's assume a lot of this stuff. It is safe to say that no one has the exact same height, so in principle, everyone has a unique height. But that's meaningless (Art, actually you are agreeing with me there, I said that it's meaningless myself). Essentially, that claim entails something like "Csaba is the only person in the world in the kind of people with the height between 1.797412 and 1.797413 meters" - but that kind of people just sounds incredibly silly! Certainly, a micrometer's difference does not warrant us to define a new kind of people. This claim is garbage. So let's assume, we say only people whose height is at least 1 inch different than the heights of other people have a "unique" height. In that case, perhaps only the top 10 tallest people and the bottom 10 shortest people have "unique" heights. If we make the criterion of uniqueness even more stringent, let's say, 5 or even 10 inches, we might find that there is only 1 person in the world (probably the tallest one but maybe not) who has a "unique" height.

Of course height is a pretty bad example since it has extreme values. It doesn't have to be something that you quantify by numbers, it just helps as an illustration. If we take some kind of a 3D coordinate system, we could say "stuff that have no other stuff within a sphere with a mile radius from it are unique." But that's a gradation right there!! You could just as well say "aha point A is unique. duh, of course it's unique, every point is. but how far is it from the closest point? 5 inches? that's not very unique! look at point B, that is 10 miles to the closest point! now that is a unique point if there ever was one!" Does anyone finally understand my point? It's just a question of cluster analysis, everything is a part of a very large space and we define these "classes" or "kinds" in practical but not unique ways (I swear I used the word by accident). Anything might or might not be unique depending of what our definitions are, and some stuff will be more unique because they are further away from everything else (they are parts of only few very wide classes of stuff) and some stuff will be quite boring because they are parts of a lot of classes, wide and narrow. So some stuff will be more unique and some stuff less.

PS: I feel compelled to say that I myself do not really use "very unique" as I know it is "common knowledge" that it's wrong and anyway unique is not a word I use all that much anyway.

[gwnn]

One final example I promise (no who am I kidding, there's gonna come a lot more of these examples), and this one actually happened. After one school holiday, the teacher asked us to tell us what was unique about our summer. Each of us had some kind of a story or something special to share. But to be honest, well, some of the stories were really boring and some of the stuff were actually duplicated. Well the duplicated ones were let's say not unique but even the non-duplicated stories, there was a girl who went to (I think) Japan for the summer, well yea, that was a unique summer! On the other hand, my claim for uniqueness was that I played two chess tournaments, which was good enough for get the job done, but it was definitely nothing impressive. While my claim to uniqueness was technically just as valid as the girl's who went to Japan, it's hard to say that saying "her summer was more unique than Csaba's" is somehow an unintelligible or illogical sentence.

[kenberg]

gwnn, on 2015-July-07, 16:04, said:

Before I go on with my circular sophistry, I should clarify that my wife, as many of my examples in this thread, is a hypothetical.

Being married to the most beautiful woman in the world is a good hypothetical. Well, maybe.