Some thoughts on qualification
As a first musing, and as a peek into where my title came from, I'm posting a paragraph I wrote for English a couple of weeks ago, which is typical of the kinds of random thoughts that occur to me -- I've held this opinion for quite some time.
The word "unique", by its very existence, demands qualification. English teachers and other grammarians often maintain it to be an absolute, unqualifiable term: something either is or is not unique, and there can be no shades in between. From such an absolutist standpoint, though, surely everything becomes unique, if examined closely. No two objects, entities or ideas are truly identical, if one is willing to look at small enough details, and so every one must be unique! Considered this way, it becomes clear that "unique" retains meaning only through unwritten convention: something can be considered "unique" only if different enough from all others to be worthy of note. If one realizes this, it then makes sense to make such a convention explicit, defining uniqueness as the degree of difference between something and its most similar counterpart. One can then talk of degrees of uniqueness, of a "radically unique" concept that shares little in common with any before it, or of a "barely unique" person hardly distinguishable from the rest of humanity.
Some other thoughts in a similar vein:
- Can anything ever accurately be described as "unqualified"? Isn't unqualified itself a qualifier, and thus innately oxymoronic?
- Similarly, nothing's unremarkable once you remark on it being so. Indeed, this word leads rapidly to paradox -- if that's all you can say about something, is or is not that object unremarkable?
- And why do English teachers have issues with qualifying "unique", but not "remarkable"? Either you can remark upon it, or you can't -- this one seems if anything a clearer argument to me.

1 Comments:
What about distinct?
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