Very Unique

Some people object to using a modifier like "very" or "a little" with the adjective "unique". They say that "unique" means "one of a kind", and that is a strict binary.

Well, they're wrong. "Unique" is not a strict binary. As with most other things, it's a continuum, and things can be more or less unique.

For example, consider the Wright brothers. They built bicycles. At first, their bicycles we made using the same designs as any other bicycle. It would be safe to say they weren't unique. But the Wright brothers were inventive fellows, and they came up with ways to improve the design of their bicycles. At that point, their bicycles were unique. There were no other bicycles like them. Then they built an even more unique machine. A machine that did something no previous machine had done. The bicycles were unique, but they were still bicycles. The airplane was a whole new thing.

Another example. Consider two books. One is full of old tropes and tired clichés. Utterly predictable, but not plagiarized. It's not unique in that it mimics other books, but it is unique in that it consists of a sequence of words that had never been written before. The other book is more original. It's unique in that no other book has a similar plot, but it's not unique in that it still consists of words printed on paper. The latter book is more unique than the first.

There are many ways something can be one of kind, and the more ways that apply, the more unique a thing is.

Prescriptivism and Descriptivism

On the internet and in newspapers, it's not uncommon to see rants about how our language is deteriorating. Words that meant one thing fifty years ago are used completely differently today. New words are made up and used as if they were cromulent. Kids these days speak grammatically uncorrectly.

And generally there will be responses to those about how that's a prescriptivist way of thinking, and prescriptivism is linguistically incorrect. Descriptivism is the only correct way of talking about language. Language is always changing, and words have no inherent meaning.

While in this context, the prescriptivists are usually completely wrong, I can't completely agree with descriptivists.

It's true that linguistics is descriptive. As a science, it has to be. The goal of linguistics is to study language to learn about how it works, and you can't learn about how something works by telling it to work differently. Kepler didn't discover the laws of planetary motion by insisting that they ought to orbit the sun in perfect circles.

But the scientific study of language is not the only way to interact with it. It's not even the most common way. The most common way of using language is the way we're using it right now - to communicate. Reading, writing, speaking, listening. And when you actually use a language, not just to study, but to communicate, you can't avoid being at least a little bit prescriptivist.

If you're trying to use words to communicate, you have to ascribe meaning to them. And if the meanings you ascribe to your words are different than the meanings the people you're trying to communicate with do, then you'll have a very hard time communicating. If you want to communicate with a large group of people, you have to get them to all use the same meanings for the same words. Words don't have inherent meaning, but it's a very useful fiction.

"Alright" is Alright

Pedantic prescriptivists claim that "alright" is not a word. That it's merely a misspelling of "all right". I disagree. I claim that "alright" is a word with a meaning distinct from "all right".

The distinction is similar to the differences between "already" and "all ready", and "all together" and "altogether". In each case, when "all" is a separate word it means just that, all. If a group of something is all ready, then all the members of that group are ready. As a single word, the "al" doesn't mean anything separate from the rest of the word.

It's the same with "all right" and "alright". "All right" means everything is correct. "Alright" is synonymous with OK.

Here's another blog on the same issue. Oddly, it says that "alright" isn't a word, and then goes on to describe the difference between the two.

Literally Misused Words

Words have no inherent meaning. They mean only what they are understood to mean.Of course the intention of words and language is to communicate, so words ought to aid that endeavor. Commonly used and unambiguous words do that. Words that no one can agree what they mean do exactly the opposite. Which is why I partially agree, and partially disagree with this.

I agree with their usage of ambivalent. There's no other word that closely matches it, and if you want to say indifferent, you can say indifferent (or apathetic).

As far as literally goes, I've never seen it used it to mean figuratively. Never. It's used as an intensifier. Frequently used in the same way as really. But never figuratively. At best, it's used in a figurative sense, but that's not the same as saying it's used in the place of figuratively. That would mean you could replace the one word with the other, and the phrase would mean the same thing. That doesn't work. Though I do think, for the sake of clarity, that literally should retain its literal meaning, rather than being used as an intensifier.

Funnily enough, enormous used to also mean wicked. You don't see anyone complaining about people misusing that anymore...

And by my authority as a blogger, I officially remove the word nonplussed from the English language. No one knows what the word means. Even if they do, they don't know that people they're communicating with understand it the same way they do. It fails to communicate clearly, and should not be used. Besides, look at it - nonplussed. Clearly neither definition given is correct: It means subtracted.