There's nothing wrong with "very unique".
Every now and then, I hear some more-pedantic-than-thou smart-ass lecturing someone about how "very unique" is a stupid thing to say. I've probably even been that smart-ass at some point in my long pedantic history, but I'm more enlightened now, and I save such behavior for other things I'm not so enlightened about.
Sometimes, when I witness one of those moronic lashings, I step in and slap the aforementioned smart-ass upside the head with a taste of true anality, but often I don't have the time or energy. With this online, I can correct and condescend with a simple URL.
If you were to consider every aspect of any two things, they would differ in at least one. Two distinct physical objects are in different places, were made at different times with different raw materials, etc. Two abstract ideas are different by definition, else they'd be considered one idea, not two.
Considered in its entirety, everything is unique. Either that makes uniqueness a trivial and uninteresting property to observe, or that's not what uniqueness is about.
When people say something is unique, they're not just saying that there's nothing else identical to it; they're saying there's nothing else like it. But what does it mean for one thing to be like another? It means that they are similar in some important ways. The more ways (or the more important the ways in which) they're similar, the more similar they are. A wooden chair is like a wooden table, but it's usually more like another wooden chair.
When someone says something is unique, they mean that nothing else is like it in a bunch of ways they think are interesting. For example, The chair I'm sitting in is unique in that I'm not sitting in any other chair at this moment, but that's not very interesting. I'd be more likely to point out the uniqueness of a chair that was made of titanium and had a fuzzy pink cushion in the shape of a wombat.
The uniqueness of something is more apparent and more interesting when it is unique in ways that most things (or most similar things) are not. All people are unique, but a person made of marmalade would be unique in a way that most people are not, material composition.
Uniqueness is also more interesting when there are a number of such interesting feature subsets. A person made of marmalade would certainly be unique, but if that person were also six meters tall, they'd probably be unique in three unusual ways! (In addition to the obvious two, I'm guessing they might be the only six meter pile of marmalade.)
When people say that something is very unique, they're saying that it's unique in an unusual way, or that it's unique in an unusual number of interesting ways. I don't know a better way to say that, nor do I find the phrase ambiguous, so I think it's a fine thing to say, except around people who think they know better.
| tmp+14203@sethoscope.netWed Dec 10 22:10 GMT 2003 |