Unique is Weak

When people use words loosely, with no regard for their precise meanings, it can lead, as Johnson O’Connor put it, “to serious mistakes of understanding and judgment.” If your boss tells you to peruse a report, how do you know whether the boss means skim it or read it carefully and critically? If someone says he’s disinterested, does that mean he’s not interested or that he’s fairminded and impartial? When people use reticent to mean reluctant, comprised of to mean composed of, or verbal to mean oral, they are not being clever, novel, or stylish. They are being either lazy or pretentious. Good usage begins with learning the precise meanings of words and ends with respecting those meanings in your writing and speech.

Take, for example, the word unique. Aren’t you thoroughly sick of it? Haven’t you had enough of unique this, unique that, everything being so very unique? I certainly have. Why? Because unique is so overused its uniqueness has worn out.

Wherever you turn these days people are trying to be unique by saying unique and they are proving only that they have mastered the art of monotonous diction. They’re being unique on television talk shows, on every page of the newspaper, in every advertising circular, and at every happy hour. Yes, everywhere intelligent people are inserting unique into their sentences as swiftly and predictably as a computer chip gets clapped onto a printed circuit board in an assembly line. But while a chip can store a great deal of information and instantaneously perform a variety of tasks, the word unique, soldered to a sentence today, does only one thing: bore, bore, bore.

As if the repetition of this word day in and day out is not enough, people have aggravated the situation by qualifying just how unique whatever they’re talking about is. They say, “My child is very unique”; “Ours is the most unique product of its kind”; “This program is completely unique.” (You will notice, please, that not once have I called the Verbal Advantage program unique. I prefer to think of it as exceptional or peerless.)

At any rate, all these flaccid (FLAK-sid, not FLAS-id, meaning “limp and weak”) modifications of unique say just one thing to me: Most people tacitly acknowledge that unique isn’t unique anymore, but they can’t seem to come up with anything better.

I suppose it won’t make much difference if I point out that, properly, unique should not be qualified. The American Heritage Dictionary contains this example of the gross (and laughable) misuse of unique: “Omaha’s most unique restaurant is now even more unique.” The sentence comes from advertising copy, where some of the most flagrant transgressions of the language occur. Something may be more unusual, or the most exceptional, but it cannot be more or most unique.

Unique comes from the Latin unicus, one, only, sole, from unus, one, and means unlike anything else, unmatched, one-of-a-kind. A thing cannot be more or less unique than another thing; it is simply unique. The restaurant in Omaha either is unique or is not — and most probably it is not.

Of course, if you consult the recent editions of MerriamWebster’s Collegiate Dictionary and Random House Webster’s College Dictionary on this issue, you will find lengthy usage notes devoted to rationalizing the current infatuation with modifying unique. Merriam-Webster says, “In modern use both comparison and modification are widespread and standard,” and Random House concludes, “Such comparison, though criticized, is standard in all varieties of speech and writing.” What both dictionaries fail to note in their defense of modifying unique is something any decent usage guide will tell you: that unique now needs modifiers because the word is addictive and its users require increasing doses of uniqueness.

Unique has been used so often as an elegant variation for unusual and uncommon that it is no longer unusual or uncommon, and hardly elegant. Unusual and uncommon mean out of the ordinary, rare. They can be modified. Something can be very unusual, or rather uncommon, but it can’t logically be very unique, unmatched, incomparable, without equal or peer.

Merriam-Webster says something else interesting in its usage note: “Unique dates back to the 17th century but was little used until the end of the 18th when, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was reacquired from French. H. J. Todd entered it as a foreign word in his edition (1818) of Johnson’s Dictionary, characterizing it as ‘affected and useless.’”

It doesn’t surprise me that in the last two hundred years the word’s standing has not improved. Through widespread acceptance unique has exchanged affectation for tedium, and through widespread use its uselessness has only been affirmed. That unique must now be dressed up to do its duty proves how feckless it has become. (By the way, feckless means weak, feeble, ineffective. It combines the Scottish word feck, effect, with the privative suffix -less to mean literally “without an effect.”)

But back to unique. If you agree with me that this feckless word is overworked and deserves a vacation, then join me in boycotting unique wherever to use it would be weak.

Here’s how you can do it: The next time unique is about to spring from your lips, pause for a moment and make the effort to summon another word—can you think of anything better right now? How about unrivaled, matchless, peerless, unparalleled, incomparable, singular, or the delicious inimitable (i-NIM-i-tuh-bul)?

These are truly elegant variations. They will make your sentence sparkle. They will awaken interest in your audience. They will set you apart from the humdrum herd of “uniquealaliacs.”

By the way, don’t bother trying to find uniquealaliac (pronounced yoo-NEEK-uh-LAY-lee-ak) in a dictionary. It’s my nonce-word, a word I made up for the occasion. I created it by affixing unique to the combining form -lalia, which comes from a Greek word meaning “talk, chat,” and in modern medicine is used to denote a speech disorder. For example, rhinolalia (RY-noh-LAY-lee-uh) is an abnormally strong nasal tone in a person’s speech; echolalia (EK-oh-LAY-lee-uh) is the habit of repeating what other people say.

So I hope you will develop a temporary case of echolalia and repeat what I’ve said about unique to as many people as you can. If together we can manage to stem the tedious tide of uniquealalia, it would be a singular, and perhaps even inimitable, achievement.