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Chris -- 2018-04-11
This gets quite a bit of use and if you don’t think about it too hard sort of seems to make sense even though it makes no sense. It was once a topic of Atlantic magazine’s Word Court.
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Ascared: I detect a common theme in a couple of your posts: this one and “One person making a concerted effort.” Another item which falls in roughly the same category is the construction: “most unique.” According to my high school English teacher, “unique” is a binary concept: Things are either unique (one-of-a-kind) or NOT unique, so there is no sense to stating a comparative degree of uniqueness.
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You guys might be interested in this thread from a copy editing blog run by a copy chief from the Washington Post: http://theslot.blogspot.com/2006/08/im- … s-who.html
A number of the participants (some of them clearly editors) come out in favor of the “one of the only” construction. There are some interesting arguments in the long comments list.
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jorkel wrote:
Ascared: I detect a common theme in a couple of your posts: this one and “One person making a concerted effort.” Another item which falls in roughly the same category is the construction: “most unique.” According to my high school English teacher, “unique” is a binary concept: Things are either unique (one-of-a-kind) or NOT unique, so there is no sense to stating a comparative degree of uniqueness.
Yes, absolutes such as unique should not be modified. Other examples: .....climbed to the very top, ......formed a perfect circle. I believe these modifiers are used as intensifiers for the speaker/writer to get their point across and as such might be helpful though gramatically off.
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patschwieterman wrote:
You guys might be interested in this thread from a copy editing blog run by a copy chief from the Washington Post: http://theslot.blogspot.com/2006/08/im- … s-who.html
A number of the participants (some of them clearly editors) come out in favor of the “one of the only” construction. There are some interesting arguments in the long comments list.
Thanks Pat, Bill Walsh’s blog was very enlightening, much food for thought.
Last edited by Ascared (2006-09-12 18:40:48)
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I much prefer, “One of the FEW..” And I have a different take: ONLY is not as clear as any of several alternatives. And ONLY has another use:
I might say, “ONLY humans worship Zeus,” or I might say, “Humans ONLY worship Zeus.” These two sentences mean two different things, but they both make sense. Note that ONLY serves as an adjective in the first, and as an adverb in the second. And we get a third separate sense of ONLY when we say, “One of the ONLY humans who worship ZEUS…”
Also note that we get a confusion between singular and plural (worship? or worships?). Are we talking about the ONE or the HUMANS? The plural verbs we need to use sometimes conflict with the intrinstic “singleness” of the word ONLY. Even if the grammar comes out right, it is convoluted, unnecessarily intricate.
So I want to save ONLY for its own special places. I only want to use ONLY where only ONLY will do. And I am not the only one who thinks this way.
Last edited by Tom Neely (2006-09-13 19:17:56)
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Tom
I agree with you as far as my own personal preference goes—“one of the few” works for me. I was fascinated by the discussion on the copy editing blog I pointed to, however. While I wasn’t wholly persuaded, I was surprised to see editors making a case for this construction in formal circumstances. And some of the examples adduced in favor of the construction were strong enough to give me pause; here’s one from a poster named Linda:
I’m with Bill. It looks to me like it’s clearly not incorrect—if you can have “the only things saved from the house were the pen and the dog,” then I don’t see how you can’t have “one of the only things saved from the house was the dog.” You’re just not specifying what the other things were. You’re not specifying them if you say “few,” either.
Personally, I think “only” is fulfilling very different functions in Linda’s first and second versions. In the first, “only” is limiting the items focused on to a specified group that’s fully accounted for. That’s what “only” usually does in that kind of construction: it says, “I’m now going to name absolutely everything that I feel this applies to.” In the second version, that function of specificity is lost; “only” is really just functioning as a synonym for “few” there. Still, her example may provide the “missing (logical) link” in explaining how people hit upon this particular use of “only.”
Forgive me my pedantry, but Tom, “only” is actually an adverb in both of your examples. I suspect you, like me, were taught that an adverb modifies only adjectives, verbs, and other adverbs. But “only” is one of a small group of “focusing adverbs” that have a really wide application across grammatical categories; they even modify nouns. Your first “only” is an adverb modifying “humans.”
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Pat,
Pedant is my middle name. Pedantries R Us! It all depends on what the definition of adverb is. “I did not have sexual relations with that adverb, Ms. Only.”
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