Using unique

Perhaps more than the average person, marketers are often tempted to use the word unique because we want to dazzle our readers and make them think that we're telling them something they have never heard before. This leads to misuse of a unique word that should only be used under special conditions.

Unique comes from the Latin word unicus, which means "alone in its kind." In other words, if something is to be called unique, that means that something had better be the only one of its kind in the whole universe.

Despite what you may want to believe most fervently, chances are the product or service you are marketing is not unique. Surely there are others out there like it, right? Your client cannot be the ONLY person in the world who thought to sell luggage. Or jewelry. Or shoes.

As my journalism professor once said, you should not use the word unique unless you have travelled the globe in order to prove that the thing you want to describe as unique is in fact the only one of its kind on this Earth. Trusting that this would be too much effort for most people to undertake, he felt confident he wouldn't be reading the word unique in our writing. He was right.

So, what to do? Try this. Any time you find yourself wanting to use the word unique, think of the conditions that made you want to use it. What about the thing makes it seem unique? List those things. Those are the things you should be writing about anyway - the qualities rather than one word that really tells us nothing.

Unique is a red flag word. It tells other people that you've run out of good things to say about something and now you're making a statement that 99 percent of the time cannot possibly be true.

Some other things to remember about unique. The word unique is an absolute, which means it cannot be more unique or most unique or rather unique or very unique. It's like the word pregnant. You either are pregnant or you are not. There is no in between and there are no degrees of being pregnant.