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Thu 1 Aug, 2013 12:41 pm
Debating with a friend. She called me out on the use of "more unique" citing that unique is finite, therefore something cannot be more unique than something else.
Today, she uses the phrase "almost never", and I called her out on it, because it seems like the same issue. Something cannot be almost never, as never is finite as well. It is either never, sometimes, forever etc...
She is a self proclaimed grammar expert, so I was given reasons why it was okay to use "almost never", but not okay to use "more unique". These reasons I did not understand. I am looking for an objective opinion to settle this debate.
I don't know what error of thought could lead to the idea of an "objective opinion", but I will charitably overlook that.
You are correct that uniqueness is usually an absolute quality; something is either unique or not, and, as you say, it does not make sense to say that something is "more" or "less" unique. However, we can use qualifiers like almost with absolutes such as unique or never. If there were one person in the world who possessed a certain quality, we would be correct to say that her or she was unique. If there were two people with that quality, they would be almost unique. If some event had not happened at all in recorded history, we might similarly say that it never happened. If it has happened extremely rarely, we could say that it has almost never (or hardly ever) happens.
You should note that grammar and logic are not the same things.
@contrex,
Clumsy editing - this is what I meant:
contrex wrote:If it has happened extremely rarely, we could say that it has almost never (or hardly ever) happened.
@contrex,
I thought you'd say that.
I almost never answer questions like this, especially when they are unique questions.
Hey . . . i gotta run . . . my wife's a little bit pregnant, and she's almost always making demands . . .
@contrex,
Thanks for the answer! Would it be safe to say that they are the same idea and that both ate acceptable?
@roland19,
Both are perfectly acceptable, Roland.
Quote:[Note on some adjectives that have been widely castigated as non-gradable because of their meaning: unique is the classic example. Some people claim that adjectives like unique cannot take degree modifiers (very unique, how unique) BECAUSE OF THEIR MEANING: unique MEANS 'only one'. Part of this claim is just fallacious Originalism (Etymology is Destiny), part raw assertion that the critic knows what the word REALLY means. To which I always ask, "How do you know this?" And, "What do you mean by really?"
This particular case is a topic for another posting. But the general situation is clear: if a word denotes the end-point of some scale (as unique surely does), then it can be used -- and will be used -- in describing approximations to that end-point, using approximative expressions like almost and nearly. (If there are only two occurrences of X in the world, then each of these is nearly unique.) Then, of course, you can ask how close to the end-point something is by asking how X it is, and you can describe something that has very few competitors for being the one and only as very X, and you can describe something that has no competitors at all as entirely X.
Back up. Some of you are objecting that unique does not denote the end-point of a scale, and you say that because unique is not used in mathematics that way. But it's a mistake to suppose, when we're talking about ordinary language, that the mathematical usage of terms takes priority over ordinary people's usage of them. Yes, in mathematical usage, unique is used "crisply", for 'one and only one' (and that's an important concept to have in mathematical contexts), but, frankly, this really doesn't have beans to do with how unique is used in ordinary English. Instead, the mathematical usage is a specialization, a refinement, of ordinary English in a technical context. (The 'one and only' use of UNMODIFIED unique is of course alive and well in modern English.)
Scalar relationships are incredibly important in the way people structure the world and talk about it, and people are inclined to see scalarity whenever they can.
The larger point is that adjectives like unique are in fact gradable in ordinary English -- while pseudo-adjectives are in general really really non-gradable.
MWDEU has a long entry on unique, with a history of the word's uses and a history of critical opinion about it. This is yet another case, unfortunately, where many writers and editors are dead set against a usage (whatever the actual practice of many other writers), so that using it will bring the disapproval of these critics down on your head.]
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=479
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