In defense of the common usage: "unique"

According to the internet, and other, more reputable sources, the word "unique" is one of many modern litmus tests for the properly-educated and grammatically fastidious. If one lazily uses the term with a modifier, i.e. "quite unique," "rather unique," or the anathematized "very unique," one is out of the club - no secret handshake, no decoder ring, no access to the secret hideout.

My so-called peers and colleagues may look upon me with shame and disgust, but I must rise to the defense of the informal and colloquial use of this term. But defending the term is meaningless if I don't first tell you why I feel compelled to do so. So, part the first: me loves words. Part the second: the word "unique."

Part The First

Although I have no great aptitude for languages or linguistics, I've developed sort of a niche when it comes to the English language. I feel a deep affinity for my native tongue. I give credit to my love of music (yay awesome song lyrics) and my method of reading books for pleasure. I tend to sort of "hear' the words as I read over them. It's hard to describe, and I need to move on. Suffice to say whatever mastery I've acheived with English is due to an inexplicable compulsion to say exactly what I mean.

See, at its very best, a language should be able to provide its user with precisely the correct words, phrases, cadence, rhythm and timing for every occasion. You don't just use whatever word you can think of; in my view of language, synonyms are words that mean essentially the same thing, and only when removed from context. Once we add the context of a story or a conversation, the nuances of synonymous words fully bloom, and as each word pushes and pulls every other, a fractal pattern emerges. Grammatical construction is equally important, as are commas and parentheses (I think, however, that I ranted quite long enough about parentheses in a previous post.)

For example, this post that I'm writing right now? It sucks! It would be much better if I weren't writing it past my bedtime on a day where I was awake at 6:30 after a terrible 5 hours of sleep, which was partly due to an exploding transformer near my apartment causing the power in my bedroom only to go haywire for two hours.

Having fully, or at least sufficiently, declared my love for words and for linguistic construction, I should tell you how I picked up the arguably nasty habit of modifying the word "unique." As with many words and phrases, I never really bothered to look it up in a dictionary or ask someone else what it meant. I heard it used in conversations and read it in books and magazines, and pieced together what it meant for myself. When I was younger, this process was explicitly encouraged. It was called "using contextual clues" by one of my teachers. It makes sense to learn language this way, because (at least in my opinion) the primary aim of learning a language should be to communicate successfully with others.

But, as with other heuristic devices, this one is not without its flaws. In addition to being dependent completely on one's sources of information (in this case, other people) not being faulty, this heuristic also fails to make any real distinction between "proper" English and all the many informal and colloquial variants you'd pass on the slippery slope from Grammar Nazi English 2.6 to Ebonics and Spanglish.

So, maybe I'm just defending the product of a flawed heuristic learning device, and insulating myself from the laborious process of correcting a bad habit. But maybe not. One of my primary criticisms of formal English is that it relies more on stricture than on rules that make sense.

I've made my peace, I suppose, with bizarre conjugations - but that's because 1) Conjugation seems arbitrary to me regardless, and 2) English is a mongrelized language, and so it stands to reason that many of its words would have mongrelized rules for pluralizing and conjugating and whatnot. Without knowing the historical background of every word, who am I to judge?

But what I cannot abide is strict adherence to a word's definition when the definition clashes with its meaning.

That does not make sense. Allow me to elaborate.

The formally accepted definition of unique is "one of a kind," not "distinctive." Ergo, the word snobs say we can't properly use the phrase "very unique." But I think they should stop parroting the definition and focus on the practical implicatiions of the word "unique."

The definition itself is nonsensical in our modern world. There is a solid scientific argument to be made that every tangible object is unique, for it touches a distinctive piece of the spacetime fabric. Two chairs that seem utterly identical to the naked eye are, upon close inspection, never truly the same. Even when we make the leap to intangibles, such as ideas or arguments or structures of government, we can easily argue that although certain ideas and structures are fundamentally related, each is unique. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that it is not only the hypertechnical separation of every object and idea that cuts against the strict usage of the word "unique," but also the fundamental similarity (though not sameness) of so many of our tangibles and intangibles.

This doesn't even begin to touch upon the sardonic ways the word is used. A person who is "very unique," for example, is being called "one of a kind" only insofar as much as "one of a kind" is understood to mean that the person is strange, bizarre, a square peg in a round hole, off the deep end, odd, quirky, etc. etc. etc.

Therefore, the formal definition of the word becomes useless... unless one concedes that in order to be strict and vigilant and proper about the word's usage, one is being willfully sloppy and lazy about its meaning in context.

From there it is not a far leap to argue that if "unique" is to have any logical and intelligent function, it makes sense to hybridize the notion of "one of a kind" with the notion of distinctiveness. What we achieve is a word with a particular flavor (it's tasty!) and a function - and a useful one at that.

Remember kids: Context is everything.

"Unique" - "being sufficiently separate and rareified to qualify without close inspection as "one of a kind," or, highly distinctive. Also, simultaneously uncommon and peculiar.

"Rather Unique" or "Somewhat Unique" - having sufficient similarities with other tangibles or intangibles such that any distinctiveness is only apparent to those with specialized knowledge, or if highlighted by argument or observation. Or, somewhat dissimilar, but with a dissimilarity that has been subjectively determined to be worthy of note.

"Very Unique" - Highly dissimlar, difficult or impossible to make useful comparison with other known tangibles or intangibles. Or, stylized or personalized and therefore subjectively determined to be worthy of note and normatively separated from others of its kind.

Honestly, I don't see the big deal.