Vance Packard’s classic 50s study The Hidden Persuaders revealed that advertising has all kinds of ways to make us buy what we otherwise wouldn’t. The tactics, he argued, are subliminal; only in retrospect do they seem blatant: “new and improved” comes to mind, as do urgings that you avoid loserhood by being part of the Pepsi “generation.” Those persuaders were “hidden” only to the extent that we failed to give them notice even while being bombarded by them. Once we did, however, we were no longer so easily taken in.
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Granted, this misuse isn’t new. Decades ago H.L. Mencken wrote in The American Language that “the American of the folk” has a predilection for double comparatives and superlatives–“to ease his soul.” He added, “I myself have heard uniquer and even more uniquer, as in ‘I have never saw nothing more uniquer.’” And in the first supplement to that huge study he noted that the press widely took Winston Churchill to task when it was alleged (mistakenly it turned out) that he’d said “uniquest” in a World War II speech before the House of Commons. That was a more usage-sensitive era.
But it’s the promiscuous use of “unique” that really vexes, partly because it’s impossible to believe that each and every thing alleged to be unique is. And there are times when we’d like to take the word seriously. Several months ago Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin defended the Mexican financial rescue plan while trying to allay fears that the United States might bail out other debtor nations by saying that “[the case of] Mexico was unique.” Many hoped he wasn’t being casual with the word.
“And when people say ‘truly’ or ‘really’ unique it’s a symptom of what linguists call devalorization, which means much the same as devaluation. It comes from the overuse of ‘unique.’ It’s in reaction to the fact that we’ve drawn the word from its proper niche and are having to make up for it.
John Weischhaus, art director at Atlanta advertising agency Tucker, Wayne, Luckie & Co., acknowledges that “unique” is so ingrained in his business that at advertising seminars he hears the query, “What’s your USP going to be?”–your “unique selling proposition.” He admits, “We say ‘unique’ quite a lot in the conceptual stage. We write it to one another and to clients about the products. Because if we’re going to mount a campaign we want to be sure among ourselves what’s unique about it.”
“Freud made us aware that mistakes–like saying ‘very unique’–are often revealing,” says Northwestern University sociologist Bernard Beck. “America has become a nation of office seekers, clamoring for notice, clamoring for attention. We hear ‘unique’ these days more than we do obvious synonyms like ‘rare’ and ‘unusual’ because they are not positive or tony enough.
These prattlers are not vealy members of Generation X supposedly outgrowing their “Yes!” and “awesome” phase–they’re sober, authoritative corporate Americans articulating a worldview that more often than not we adopt for ourselves. They’ve inflated “unique” with thousands of gassy claims about things the innocent word was never meant to denote. Imagine yourself as the word “unique”–wouldn’t you feel ill used, cheapened, undone? Which word will they pick on next?
