Cryptic food and drink

I'll settle for strange. Degrees of strangeness are of no concern.

At least this is better than degrees of uniqueness, which appear to exist only in the vacuous 'minds' of market researchers. As I recently pointed out to one of these slithering worms, uniqueness is a binary condition.
 
Duck59 said:
I'll settle for strange. Degrees of strangeness are of no concern.

At least this is better than degrees of uniqueness, which appear to exist only in the vacuous 'minds' of market researchers. As I recently pointed out to one of these slithering worms, uniqueness is a binary condition.
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I'll bet I'm a bit stranger than you but perhaps in different ways. I gave up caring about degrees when I retired from the University system (2008) :woot::woot::dance::dance:. Sorry about the emoticons.

Can you explain why uniqueness is binary. Is it because it can't be unique unless there is an 'other'?
 
Something is either unique or it isn't. I remember a BBC programme where someone said that some particular antiquity was unique and then added that there were eight of them in existence. Much shouting at the television followed.
 
Duck59 said:
Something is either unique or it isn't. I remember a BBC programme where someone said that some particular antiquity was unique and then added that there were eight of them in existence. Much shouting at the television followed.
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Oh yes, I see what you mean now by binary. The other one that irritates me is 'very unique' which comes up quite a lot in all kinds of contexts.
 
There are some things that are simply a yes or a no. Something cannot be "very unique", "quite unique", "rather unique" or any other shade of unique any more than a woman can be "slightly pregnant."

It will probably come as no great surprise that the odd person has, in the past, deemed me to be a pedant. My usual answer to that is that "you may call it pedantry, I call it being right."

It's not my fault. I studied linguistics, so the education system is to blame.
 
Duck59 said:
There are some things that are simply a yes or a no. Something cannot be "very unique", "quite unique", "rather unique" or any other shade of unique any more than a woman can be "slightly pregnant."

It will probably come as no great surprise that the odd person has, in the past, deemed me to be a pedant. My usual answer to that is that "you may call it pedantry, I call it being right."

It's not my fault. I studied linguistics, so the education system is to blame.
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I'm in accord with you. These things irritate me too. I enjoy linguistics and have been known to read dictionaries at bedtime.
 
morning glory said:
I'm in accord with you. These things irritate me too. I enjoy linguistics and have been known to read dictionaries at bedtime.
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Me too! I've just bought Righting the Mother Tongue from Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling by David Wolman (which may be interesting because he is an American!), and The Story of English in 100 Words by David Crystal (which should be even more interesting because he isn't!), for a bit of light bed-time reading. I love reading dictionaries - I've got a 53 year old Webster's Dictionary (illustrated version) which I used to find fascinating, but it is so heavy I can barely lift it now.

 
Among the curious array of reference books at Mallard Towers is a 1924 copy of The Royal English Dictionary. It's a fascinating thing to explore, as much for what it doesn't contain as what it does.
 
And don't get me started on the 1923 railway pre-grouping atlas that inhabits the same shelves. You'd be amazed at the tiddly places that had stations. Some even had more than one station.
 
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