Gramer Girl here. I'm Minyeon Foguri and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff. Today we'll

talk about why modifying the word unique and noise some people and why it actually

isn't unique at all, about whether you should capitalize the words delta variant when

referring to the coronavirus variant that's dominant in most of the world right now, and

about whether a twinkie qualifies as a good dessert.

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 Andy Begg's 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 you just heard aren't mistakes. They aren't

made an error by young children just starting to use the word, or by adult language learners.

Instead, it's 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. Another example is how for many people in the Southern United States, Coke

has expanded to mean any soda. Time for a fun area of beginner semantics, which is

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