Thursday, September 22, 2005

A Very Unique Pet Peeve

I can't stand it when people use the phrase "very unique" when they really mean "very unusual". Unique means "one of a kind" and therefore cannot take a modifier like very.

I was just listening to NPR and a teacher, a teacher for Christ's sake, talked about her "very unique students" who had gone to Iraq. A teacher!

Someone should wash her mouth out with soap, talking to students like that.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Me too!
On a somewhat random linguistic note, this goes with the story of the grammar teacher telling the class about double negatives:

Teacher: 2 negatives make a positive, but 2 positives do not make a negative.

Student: Yeah, right.

>;-)