Philip Ochieng
1 September 2007
column
Nairobi — It was natural for an American tourist to describe Kenya's Maasai Mara as "most unique". The periodic trek of its wildebeest is breathtaking. Yet it is inferior to my Zoo of Linguistic Animals.
One can spend a whole day there, watching the most exotic ungulates and cetaceans. Elsewhere, political and environmental correctness has done irreparable damage even to linguistic fauna.
Among my unicorns are quite unique, very unique, almost unique and the species that our visitor mentioned, most unique. Before such international poachers launched this attack on us, unique was all alone.
Indeed, to say that unique stood alone is to exaggerate. For - just as our gnu is just another name for wildebeest - so alone is just another name for unique. This was why we called it "unique". It was more solitary than Richard Leakey's gibbon.
There was nothing to compare it with. Like the Judaeo-Islamic monotheon, it still stands alone, with attributes that cannot be graded. If he is "omniscient", "omnipresent" and "omnipotent", then these adjectives are absolute and cannot be qualified.
We cannot attach "very", "quite" or "most" to them because these express comparison and even limitation. They imply that "omniscience", "omnipotence" and "omnipresence" have degrees and gradations. They mean that an animal can be "more omnipresent" than another.
That is a logical impossibility because the Greek prefix "OMNI" means "all" and, therefore, cannot be compared. Nothing can be "more all" or "less all" than another. The Judaeo-Islamic deity is omniscient only if nothing is beyond his ken. It is thus quite unnecessary to reinforce the adjective "omniscient" with "very", "quite" and "most".
"Perfect" is another example. A thing is either "perfect" or it is not. There are no degrees of "perfection". There is no such thing as "very perfect" or "most perfect". Only metaphorically does Charles Darwin use the expression "more perfect".
He is replying in advance to Boston's Watchtower denizens, people who conveniently refuse to understand the theory of "preadaptation". The human eye, for instance, passed through many "less perfect" physiological stages to reach its present "perfection".
Uniqueness, then, cannot be qualified. A thing is unique because there is only one example of it. If there were two, they would no longer be unique because unique means one. It comes from French, where it derives from pronoun un (feminine une), meaning "one". "Very unique", "quite unique" and "most unique" are thus uniquely fatuous.
The word "one" might have created its own "one-ic" or "onic" to correspond with unique. It didn't. But it created two important adjectives, "alone" and "only". "Alone" evolved from "all one" and "only" from "one-ly"
The latter is a derivative of the Old English anlic, a combination of an ("one") and lic (the Germanic element that evolved into ly, the wordlet which we suffix to most adjectives to change them into adverbs). Thus both "only" and "alone" mean "unique". So it is tautological to speak of "only one" or "one alone" and it is contradictory to speak of "only two". But help yourself because both errors are time-honoured.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2007 The Nation. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
