Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

haud negassim

Oh, dear the year is coming to an end, and so is our good old English language. What to do with solecisms like very unique, rather unique, or most unique? It’s obviously not enough that the word unique in these examples has a secondary and common meaning different from sole or only and more like strange or unusual. Worthless excuses. And, needless to say, this has been going on for quite some time.

A thing is unique, or not unique; there are no degrees of uniqueness; nothing is ever somewhat or rather unique, though many things are almost or in some respects unique. The word is a member of a depreciating series. Singular had once the strong meaning that unique has still in accurate but not in other writers. In consequence of slovenly use, singular no longer means singular, but merely remarkable; it is worn out; before long rather unique will be familiar; unique, that is, will be worn out in turn, and we shall have to resort to unexampled and keep that clear of qualifications as long as we can. Happily it is still admitted that sentences like the three given below are solecisms; they contain a selfcontradiction. For the other regrettable use of unique, as when the advertisement columns offer us what they call unique opportunities, it may generally be assumed with safety that they are lying; but lying is not in itself a literary offence, so that with these we have nothing to do.

Thrills which gave him rather a unique pleasure. [Richard H.] Hutton, [Sir Walter Scott, 1878].

A very unique child, thought I. C. Brontë, [Villette, ch. 3].

...is to be translated into Russian by M. Robert Böker, of St. Petersburg. This is a somewhat unique thing to happen to an English textbook. Westminster Gazette.

[Fowler, King’s English, 1908.]

So, imagine my surprise to find this in Plautus:

Hegio: Alienus cum eius incommodum tam aegre feras,
quid me patrem par facerest, cui ille est unicus?

Ergasilus: Alienus ego? alienus illi? aha, Hegio,
numquam istuc dixis neque animum induxis tuom;
tibi ille unicust, mi etiam unico magis unicus.

[Plautus, Captivi, I.ii..146-50.]

Hegio: When an outsider like you takes his misfortune so bitterly, how must I feel, his father, and he my only son?

Ergasilus: An outsider? I? An outsider to that boy? Oh, Hegio! don’t say a thing like that, don’t let such a thought enter your mind, ever! Your only son, yes,—but he was more than that to me: he was my only only!

[translation by Paul Nixon.]

“For he was more unique than unique to me.” And these are two upperclass Roman gentlemen speaking. It seems that some utterances are more solecist than others. Of course, it may be that Plautus is making a point by using ungrammatical Latin, but then who’s to say that folks who say a very unqiue book aren’t making a point, too. A slippery linguistic slope to be sure. In fact, Plautus uses a similar construction in his Bacchides: “Ad illam quae tuom / perdidit, pessum dedit tibi filium unice unicum.” [Bacchides III.iii.3.] (To the woman who has depraved, destroyed your one and only son!) Your uniquely unique son, indeed. (We’ll pass over the use of magis rather than the comparative suffix -ior in silence.)

Posted by jim at December 30, 2003 09:08 AM | TrackBack