Is 'Very Unique' Wrong?

The word "unique" means "one of a kind," but the way people use it has been shifting. For example, here are some real-life sentences from British and American speakers:

• "She is completely unique." (That comes from a video describing the then-star of the Royal Ballet in London) or 
• "It needs to be more unique than that." (Listen for that in the film "Inception"), or even
• "…most uniquely," which comes from a video about Andi bags, sort of a cross between a purse and a tote bag. 

In all three examples, the word "unique" has been modified, either by an intensifier adverb ("completely" as in "completely unique") or by a comparative or superlative ("more" and "most" as in "more unique" and "most unique"). And some people complain that modifying the word "unique" like this is technically not logical. How can something be more unique than something else? Isn’t it the case that something is either unique or not?

Well, yes, and yet, we all know that the three cases above aren't mistakes—they aren't made in error by young children just starting to use the word or by adult language learners. Instead, it is a use that suggests the real meaning of the word is expanding to also include "uncommon" or "rare." (When words take on additional meanings like this, it’s sometimes called "lexical broadening," and another example is how, for many people in the southern United States, "coke" has expanded to mean "any soda.")

What are gradable vs. absolute adjectives, and degree modifiers (aka intensifiers)?

Time for a fun area of beginner semantics, which is the study of what words mean. Using an adverb to boost the meaning of an adjective is often called "intensification" in linguistics. Some examples of intensifiers are "very," "really," and "incredibly." In other words, when we say someone is "very tall," or that a sunset is "incredibly beautiful," we mean more than merely tall, and more than just somewhat beautiful. (1)

Do you notice anything about the adjectives "tall" and "beautiful"? They’re all gradable. Some can be measured, like height, and some can't, like beauty, which is subjective, but either way, they all have degrees of gradation, which is what allows them to be intensified. To understand this, think of gradable antonyms (pairs of words with opposite meanings), like tall/short, good/bad, pretty/ugly, and big/small....

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