- By Jim Evans
- Entertainment
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Smart Talk SMART TALK By Laconia Crisp, N.P.
VERY UNIQUE: Potential patients at the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired can often be screened with this simple test: Do they use adjectives with “unique?” If they do, they need about a week of treatment at the William Safire Center to relearn the word “unusual.”
They also learn that “unique” needs protection as a unique word. It means one of a kind and saves us the trouble of saying “one of a kind.” If something is unique, there’s nothing like it. That makes phrases like very unique and most unique redundant.
These patients leave saying highly unusual, most unusual, etc, understanding that modifying “unique” is fatuous, a lot like saying a little bit pregnant or surrounded on all sides.
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