A thing is unique only if it is the only one of its kind

Unique is one adjective that most of East Africa’s users of the English language permanently fail to tame. Take the headline “Co-ops’ unique way of creating a sustainable future” (page 29 of the DailyNation of June 2). From the story, I saw nothing unique about that co-op. To be sure, the co-op had quite a few unusual features.

The word unique is in common misuse throughout the English-speaking world including England the United States, especially among fashion writers. No, unique does not mean “special” or “rare” or “very good” or “excellent”. All those adjectives imply comparison. For a thing or idea can be “special”, “rare”, “very good” or “excellent” only in relation to other things or ideas.

But the adjective unique is beyond all such comparisons. Why? Because each of these adjectival categories implies many different degrees of it. Though many things may have exactly the same quality of goodness, the plurality of examples of things with that quality means that none of those things can be unique any longer.

Though this is almost self-evident, fashion writers commit the mistake again and again. Fashion reviewers describe certain dress creations as “unique” merely because such creations were unusual or “very good”. But this seems self-evident: To be unusual or very good or even excellent is not necessarily to be unique.

Why not? Because the Franco-English word unique comes from the French numeral un (“one”), whose feminine form is une. To be unique, then, is to have no semblance or resemblance in your whole category. To be unique is to have none of what Kiswahili calls kifani. It is to have no exemplar, no lookalike, no model.

The Swahili noun kifani has the same etymological root as the verb kufana. In his usually playful biology, Desmond Morris, the English evolutionary scientist, calls it “self-mimicry”, arguing that the human female developed a pair of “mounds” on her chest by “mimicking” the pair of “mounds” already at her bottom.

Kufanana is to resemble each other and the noun mfano refers to a categorical example of semblances. But to be unique is to be absolutely alone in your category. English borrowed the adjective unique directly from French after William the Conqueror, a swaggerer from Normandy, France, rode roughshod all over England in AD 1066.

The adjective unique comes from un (masculine) or une (feminine), the French numeral for “one”. Thus a thing or idea is uniqueonly if it is the only example of its kind existing. It is for that reason that the earth’s moon is unique, namely, because the moon is the only satellite around our planet.

In Kenya’s city of Nairobi, the Kenyatta International Convention Centre is unique because it is the only human-built circular spindle that scrapes the skies of our administrative headquarters. Let me reiterate, then, that a thing is unique only if it is the only one of its kind existing in given circumstances.

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