Thread by @AlexandraErin

Well, the argument against that amounts to: "if something is an absolute, it either is or isn't. You can't be a little bit dead, or halfway pregnant, or very unique."

But what if I told you that uniqueness is less absolute than deadness?

https://twitter.com/bigunit1310/status/1173649008365068288

Deadness refers to a single attribute. It is, for most purposes, a thing one either is or is not. One cannot, for most purposes, be more dead or less dead than anything else, outside of that binary structure.

If no one in the history of the universe had died before you, then until someone else matched your achievement, you would be absolutely dead and also uniquely dead. We could say you were dead and also unique.

But uniqueness is not just measuring this one attribute! Uniqueness refers to all attributes we are able to consider.

So imagine we have a data set that involves ten samples of rocks taken from various rock places. Most of them are pretty similar. Two of them are anomalous. One of those anomalies has a color and a density not found in the rest of the sample. The other is only off in density.

We could say that both of these rocks are unique in the set. It's true! None of the other rocks matches them.

But.

Is not one of them more unique than the other?

"Uniqueness is absolute."

Yes. And it possesses two absolute uniquenesses.

The other has only one.

Now, imagine the two anomalous rocks have the same density as each other, but are different colors from one another.

The rock that has the same density as one rock and the same color as eight other rocks is still unique. No other rock has that combination in the whole sample.

But the two attributes it possesses in a unique combination are themselves not separately unique within the set.

Would we say this rock is as unique as it would be, if its density were not shared with the other rock?

And of course, we're already qualifying the uniqueness: the rocks are unique within this set.

Maybe there's someone who doesn't like modifiers on "unique" who also doesn't like it when it's used with anything but an entirely open-ended scale.

Maybe there's someone who doesn't like constructions like "unique in modern Spanish history" or "unique within this region" because qualifying uniqueness is another way of saying "not absolutely unique" but I've never observed that.

If we find a person whose goldfish collection is unique within the region of a small town versus a person whose similar collection is unique within a whole metropolitan area, are we not noting that the latter is more unique than the former?

Uniqueness, to make a long story short (TOO LATE!), is a multifaceted phenomenon, not a single quantifiable attribute. Demanding that we treat it as a binary ignores what it actually refers to, which is the totality of a thing.

Saying something is "somewhat unique" is like saying it is "in some ways unique" and... obviously most things that are unique are unique only in some ways and common in others. From that starting point, we can understand "very unique", "more unique", "a little unique", etc.

I believe that most people who feel a twinge of pain over constructions like "very unique" or "somewhat unique" are actually working through the cognitive dissonance of having been literally or figuratively rapped on the knuckles over it in their own formative years.

And honestly... just let go of that and your life will be so much better.

Also, I guess the rock example just underlines how absolutely not absolute "uniqueness" is. Because if we ignore our hypothetical data set and look at the rocks, they're all unique. They're all different rocks. Different sizes, different striations, etc.

The colors we're saying are the same color actually vary from rock to rock. If we're talking on an absolute scale, every grain of sand and every blade of grass is unique, but that's not *useful* and words that convey no useful information aren't words, they're noises.

So ultimately it's another substitution of magic for logic, just as insisting that "literally" can't be used in a figurative sense is. The word unique... is not unique. Things are more unique or less unique depending on the scale and scope at which their uniqueness is apparent.