As will come as no surprise to readers of this blog, I’m one of those people about grammar. I will arch an eyebrow if you say you feel “nauseous” when you mean “nauseated.” I still refuse, in what I recognize is an utterly futile gesture, to use “hopefully” except as a description of someone’s mindset. And as flipping through an old copy of George Carlin’s Braindroppings at home over the holidays reminded me, this means I’m supposed to be equally persnickety about the use of “unique” with modifiers. Expressions like “very unique” or “more unique” are supposed to be pleonastic at best, and probably just nonsense.

But I think this one might be defensible. I am unique. You are unique. We are each different from every other human being on the planet in a variety of ways. We are all precious snowflakes. This is even true of clone number 127 of a series of 300 biologically identical persons, since he’ll have his own distinct set of life experiences and whatnot. But surely there’s a perfectly coherent sense in which, though he is unique and I am unique, I am more unique in that there are not 299 other people who share anything as significant as my genetic makeup. (On the other hand, the reverse is arguably also true, since at present, being one of a 300-member group of clones is sufficiently unusual as to be a pretty interesting distinguishing trait.) I guess “distinct” is the word you’d traditionally use here, but given the multiplicity of dimensions on which anything can be similar to or different from everything else in the world, the idea of “relative uniqueness” seems coherent enough.

Tangent: Was George Carlin funnier earlier in his career, did I just find him funnier because I was younger, or is it rather that a new generation of comedians has raised the bar for what seems edgy and subversive? Will Chris Rock sound like Andy Rooney to our kids?