The 2011 organizational rankings are up on ESPN.com for Insiders. The two most upset fan bases are Cleveland, because I ranked them 17th; and the Yankees, because I didn’t rank the Red Sox 30th.
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> special
“It’s good that they don’t make many players like Albert Pujols, because if there were more, he wouldn’t be so special, and Albert Pujols is very special.” – Murray Chass, The New York Times. See special.
Roy Blount, Jr., humorist, former sportswriter, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me… panelist, and word-lover, takes aim at etymology and bad writing alike in Alphabet Juice
In Alphabet Juice, Blount chooses words with interesting stories or for which he can offer a brief quote (like the one above) or quip or (regrettably) some light verse. The anecdote that constitutes the entry for “TV, on being on” runs from William Ginsburg to Saul Bellow to Designing Women to Kathleen Sullivan to Claude Monet, all inside of four pages. Blount sneaks in some memoir-ish material as well, such as an entry for “Wilt: A Tall Tale,” that starts out with musings on whether Wilt Chamberlain could really have slept with 20,000 women (Wilt: “Well, there was this one birthday party…”) but ends with Blount mediating between an angry Wilt and Blount’s drunken editor.
Some of the entries reveal Blount as a Lynne Truss-ian grammar stickler, a bent of which I approve:
> unique
I have to be firm on this: unique is not to be modified. Adding very or absolutely is like putting a propeller on a rabbit to make him hop better. It won’t work, and he won’t be a rabbit any more.
I’ve always been partial to the analogy that something can be “almost unique” in the way that you can be “almost pregnant.” There is a word for the idea expressed by “almost unique” – unusual. Use it. Please.
Blount’s love of words (aside from a love of language – these are two different afflictions) even brings this fun entry that should appeal to the anagrammists and Scrabblers in the audience:
> transposition game
Rearranging the letters in one word of an existing title or well-known phrase. Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception becomes The Odors of Perception. The Continental Army becomes the continental Mary. I’m told that Burt Bernstein, then a writer at The New Yorker, learned of this game and found himself to be good at it. He hastened to his brother Leonard, who had always been better at everything than Burt, but now, finally, maybe … Burt explained the game. Leonard looked up from whatever major thing he was doing and said: “Icy fingers up and down my penis.”
If there’s a flaw in Alphabet Juice, it’s that it’s a book to be perused rather than read. There’s no narrative, and the themes and jokes to which Blount returns again and again are scattered throughout the book. You could follow his suggestions to see other entries, but would risk never reading everything in the book, a risk I was unwilling to take. I could also have done without the meditations on each individual letter – Blount is supporting an argument he makes that the relation between a word (its sound, that is) and its meaning is not, as some scholars would have it, arbitrary. That’s an interesting debate, but not one Blount is going to solve in 300-word essays on each of the 26 letters of our alphabet.
At heart, though, Alphabet Juice is a vehicle for Blount’s ruminations not just on language but on culture and cultural literacy, on politics (he was apparently not a fan of the most recent President Bush), on music, on food, and so on. If you like his smart-folksy style, you’ll love the book.
P.S. Tender is the Thing.
Next up: Hilary Mantel’s Fludd
Unique can be modified but cannot be modified by comparatives or superlatives. For example, it is perfectly acceptable to say that Blount’s book is surprisingly unique or refreshingly unique. I wish you could comment upon the uniqueness of the Mets farm system, but sadly accept that it is depressingly mundane at best.
The Sun Also Sires
Keith, in case you were considering seeing a Mariners game this year (well, as long as Felix is pitching, anyway), thought this might seal the deal
http://seattle.mariners.mlb.com/news/press_releases/press_release.jsp?ymd=20110124&content_id=16493692&vkey=pr_sea&fext=.jsp&c_id=sea
By the way, if you ever have the inclination to read Blount’s latest, “Hail, Hail, Euphoria!,” I highly suggest watching Duck Soup first. Blount delves into myriad details surrounding what he calls (and what may be) the greatest war movie ever made, but unless you’ve seen the film recently, it’s easy to get lost among his many tangents and meandering passages. Good thing he’s still got that smart-folksy charm.
(Or, should that have been Duck Opus?)
I must admit, I have little patience for misguided language thinking of the Lynne Truss variety. If we are going to be stickler about using the proper word in the proper place and so on, I’d like to object to your use of the word “grammar”, since using “unique” when “unusual” may be more appropriate is not a grammar issue at all, but merely a problem of word choice.
As for unique itself, Blount is not merely fighting a losing battle, but a lost one. OED documents unique back to early 400 years, and has unique with modifiers going back 200 years. Half the word’s life it’s been “absolutely unique”, “totally unique”, or “very unique”. Though I don’t use it that way, I don’t really understand the point of the objection to using unique to mean “distinct” or “unusual”.
Words like “really” and “very” once only referred to things that were actual and true. Now, they’re common simply as intensifiers. “Literally” is also making this transformation. You don’t have to play along with it, but the tide flows whether the Lynne Trusses and Strunks & Whites of the world like it or not. I just wonder what is gained to whine about it, for Blount or anyone else. I prefer my own language use, at least when written formally, to be more precise than a phrase like “very unique” allows, but I have no trouble understanding what other people mean when they use it differently.
But if unique now means unusual, how do we express the old meaning of unique?
I’ve never liked the whole this is how language goes argument. Use language properly if you wish to be understood.
It doesn’t just mean unusual, though. It also means unusual, in addition to one-of-a-kind. As for being understood, I have sincere doubts that you’ve ever read a sentence with unique and were unable to determine what it meant.
Words have lots of different meanings, some of them are similar (unique: unusual, one-of-a-kind) and some of them are diverse (post: snail mail, army encampments, blog articles, trading stations, stems of earrings, bail, etc). Unique has meant unusual for 200 years. This is not a sudden, recent problem. It would seem that a portion of the population happens not to like some of the definitions of certain words, which is patently ridiculous.
I’m not sure what percentage of English words are polysemous, but it’s not small, and thanks to context we are able to fish the intended meaning from the astonishing majority of sentences without further aid or trouble.
I’m not trying to argue that “this is how language goes, you should just start using literally and unique the way everyone on Twitter uses them”. Merely that language is going (and has gone) this way, unstoppably, so I’m uncertain what is gained from whinging about it. Certainly not clarity.
Nobody’s whinging about anything. I write, and I strive for clarity. One key to clear writing is using words properly. You may disagree that clarity is an admirable goal, or you may set the bar for clarity in a different place. But using words or phrases incorrectly does not enhance clarity, and in many cases, if not most, it reduces it, either by creating confusion or by making expression of the same idea more complicated. (When you say a situation is “unique,” I’m left to wonder whether it’s one-of-a-kind or merely unusual. You would have to elaborate on the word to make it clear. That’s wasteful.) But calling it “whinging” is a backdoor argumentum ad hominem, something I generally do not countenance here.
I think there are a couple of issues here. First of all, while it is clear, as TC points out, from extensive usage, that unique can be used to mean ‘unusual,’ it seems to me that such a usage is necessarily hyperbolic in practice. If you describe someone as having a ‘unique smile,’ you are not really asking the listener to believe that that person has an absolutely one-of-a-kind smile, just that he/she has a particularly unusual smile. For me, that is not only a perfectly acceptable usage, but I would argue that language would lose some of its charm were we to shun such poetic effects. Furthermore, in almost all cases, context will make it quite clear how the word is being used (or the distinction will be immaterial), so I can’t say that the clarity issue bothers me significantly.
Secondly, we have the issue of intensifying modifiers with unique. For me, that is stylistically bad, because it is redundant and therefore, as Keith said, wasteful (as I stated above, even if it’s being used to mean ‘unusual,’ the implied hyperbole makes words like ‘very’ unnecessary). With that said, it does not seem to me unclear in the least – you would know what I mean if I said ‘very unique’ just as well as if I said ‘unique’ – you just might curl your lip in derision when you read it (which is one reason I would try never to write it). Similarly, you should only ever have one ‘alternative’ (alter in Latin means ‘the other of two’), but if someone spoke of having three alternatives, I would still know precisely what was meant, even if I disapproved of the phrasing.
Language is a strange thing; some of its magic comes from clarity, some from simplicity, some from complexity, some from flexibility. Different forms of speaking or writing draw more heavily on certain aspects of that, and therefore it seems to me tenuous to argue too vociferously about absolutes of language.
Allow me to clarify: I do not, personally, use unique to mean unusual. I also strive for clarity when I write, and generally agree that ambiguity and confusion are to be avoided when possible. Also, I’m not accusing you of whinging, but rather the Blount/Truss class of pedants. Well, Truss, at least, since I haven’t read Blount.
Anyway, back to modifying unique. I agree, it’s dispreferable, but I’ve never struggled to understand intent in given situation (since, when unique is modified it nearly always is takes its meaning as unusual), and there is a large gulf between dispreferable and wrong.
The only point I’m trying to raise is that, for 200 years, the entire existence of unique as a widespread English word, it’s been modified to take on the meaning of unusual. Regardless of our personal usages, the larger fight is lost. So why are we talking about it? I mean this genuinely, and not simply rhetorically. Unless this is simple venting (in which case, it’s your blog, vent away), it doesn’t make sense to me.
On the unmodificationality of “unique” – I guess that means such phrases as “truly unique” or “actually unique” or “by-definition unique” would be unacceptable, no?
I’ve also “never liked the whole this is how language goes argument”. Thank heavens no one has ever been inventive with language. I, for one, am comforted that Shakespeare never invented “uncomfortable”!
Finally, on Lynne Truss: stickler or no, she’s not a grammarian, she’s a punctuationist, and a not-very-good one, at that. http://tinyurl.com/32wa4f
Thank heavens no one has ever been inventive with language.
I’m not sure if you are actually confused, or just trying to make a point and failing. I make up words and phrases all the time, or use words outside their normal connotative comfort zones. But I do so to express new meanings, to enhance clarity, rather than to lose it.
The problem is that using word X to mean something very much not-X reduces clarity. That is what I oppose.
“Regardless of our personal usages, the larger fight is lost. So why are we talking about it?”,
Because one way makes for better writing than another. People who care about good writing like to write about what makes good writing good. Who cares if the “larger fight is lost”. This isn’t a pointless convention that exists only to trip people up on the SATs. Words used precisely are more powerful than words that are not.
Greetings, Keith–
Just stumbled upon your blog upon your appointment as part-time co-host of Baseball Today. It’s fantastic; I’m very impressed.
Alphabet Juice is a fun, winding read. My favorite entry is for a word I’d never heard of: “Tmesis,” the act of splitting a word with another for emphasis. Like one of my favorite phrases, “a whole nother,” but nowadays pretty much reserved for the interjection of the “f” word into just about any other.
I’ll keep reading, and good luck with your house!