The traditional swashbuckler, described by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a swaggering bravo or ruffian; a noisy braggadocio’, was, indeed, someone who ‘swashed his buckle’. To ‘swash’, in the sixteenth century, was to dash or strike something violently, while a ‘buckler’ was a small round shield, carried by a handle at the back. So a swashbuckler was literally one who made a loud noise by striking his own or his opponent’s shield with his sword.

Errol Flynn also had roles as both a buccaneer and a musketeer. The origin of musketeer is quite simple: a soldier who fought with a musket. But a buccaneer may surprise. It originally meant someone who hunted wild oxen, because boucaner in French was to dry or cure meat on a boucan: a barbecue, in the manner of the Indians. The name was first given to the French hunters of St Domingo, who prepared the flesh of the wild oxen and boars in this way. This included hunters at sea: pirates who lurked off the West Indies, and so over time a buccaneer became a byword for a hostile sea rover.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning the Jolly Roger. Some linguists believe this name for a pirate’s flag, featuring a white skull on a black background, originated in the French words jolie rouge, meaning ‘pretty red’ for originally pirates used red flags as frequently as black ones. Supporting this theory is the fact that during the Elizabethan era ‘Roger’ was a slang term for beggars and vagrants and was also applied to privateers who operated in the English Channel. There are other theories too, including one plausible one that the term derives from a nickname for the devil, ‘Old Roger’: jolly perhaps because of the skull’s grin.

An extract from What Made the Crocodile Cry? by Susie Dent

People and places

Biographical details of Colonel Joseph Kyle Rickey are sparse and difficult to track down, but those we have offer a fascinating sketch of an eclectically talented American. Born in 1842 and variously employed as a soldier, politician, and entrepreneur, Rickey’s name stands out in an age of pioneers and frontiers for one particular achievement: at some point in the late 1880s it became associated with a species of highball being served in an unsalubrious Washington saloon. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records this in the etymology of rickey:

Probably < the name of Colonel Joseph K. Rickey (1842–1903), U.S. politician, said to have invented the drink in a bar in Washington, D.C.

The OED’s full entry cites an unusual amount of contemporary evidence linking Rickey to the mixture of bourbon, lime juice, and sparkling water. But the qualifying ‘said to’ here allows for conflicting accounts which suggest that the barman may have been responsible instead, and even contesting the exact ingredients.

It seems the rickey has always been an adaptable concept, and if you ordered one in a bar today it might be mixed with gin, or lemon juice, or without any alcohol at all. The OED’s definition reflects this range of options:

A cocktail typically consisting of whisky or gin, lime juice, carbonated water, and ice. Also: a non-alcoholic drink made with lime juice and carbonated water. (Chiefly with modifying word indicating the type of alcohol or flavour, as gin rickey, lime rickey, etc.)

Colonel Rickey was apparently less than happy to have his name and career reduced to something so insubstantial as the title of a cocktail. But he made the best of it—he went on to become one of America’s first major importers of limes.

His story demonstrates that the creation of cocktails and the terms that attach to them is, by its very nature, a hazy and inexact science. However, cocktail names are traditionally much less exotic and experimental than the drinks themselves, and while few have origins as personal—however legendarily so—as the rickey, many associate plainly with their birthplaces. For example: the manhattan; the Singapore sling; the daiquiri, after a beach in Santiago, Cuba; or the Buck’s Fizz, first made at London’s Bucks Club and marginally more inventively titled than the Clover Club. OED’s entry for Martini informs that it was originally known as a ‘Martinez’, after the city in western California.

The Bellini is a poetic exception, concocted in Venice’s Harry’s Bar and so called because its distinctive peach colour reminded its creator, Giuseppe Cipriani, of the sumptuous tones used by Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini. OED’s etymology at Bellini tells this story and links out to carpaccio—the dish of raw meat also created by Cipriani and named along the same lines, after the scarlet-robed figures that feature in Vittore Carpaccio’s paintings.

The tale of the cockerel’s tail

The origins of cocktail itself remain mysterious. As Jerry Hall discovered during a ‘Balderdash & Piffle’ wordhunt, it is first mentioned in 1803 in a New Hampshire newspaper, The Farmer’s Cabinet, in a diary of a ‘lounger’ containing the record:

Drank a glass of cocktail—excellent for the head… Call’d at the Doct’s…drank another glass of cocktail.

The drink here is unspecified, though it clearly has an appropriately therapeutic effect. OED’s evidence shows it glossed more recognizably three years later as ‘a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters’. Its probable if opaque association with a ‘cockerel’s tail’ led to a slightly later attempt at a more deliberately Americanized equivalent, the rooster tail; a word still current in North America and used to name a number of different types of cocktail.

The prevailing idea that cocktails were mass-popularized in Prohibition-era America – when the creative use of sugars and other ingredients could mask poor quality home-brewed alcohol – is reflected by the amount of terminology dating from the early half of the twentieth century, including many common compounds. The concept of a cocktail party, or a cocktail bar, where it is always cocktail hour, and one might go cocktailing—all originate in the 1920s or 30s.

A blend of good advertising and wishful thinking

It is not until the 1970s and 80s and the success of cocktails characterized by more elaborate combinations of ingredients that their names appear correspondingly more playful and emblematic, describing an effect (as the mai tai, from the Tahitian ‘maita’i’, meaning ‘pleasant, nice, good’), or an aspiration (as the cosmopolitan), or possibly both (the Sex on the Beach). Such terms are curious from a lexicographical perspective because they no longer contain any obvious trace of the origins or contents of the drinks to which they refer, despite their artificiality. They succeed as colourful blends of good advertising and wishful thinking, mixed quickly and deliberately to suit a commercial purpose rather than brewed slowly over time as part of a wider process of language development.

This article originally appeared on OED Online.

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the publication of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. His dystopian novel, set sometime in the near-future, tells the story of teenage anti-hero Alex and his gang of friends, and their violent escapades.

Tea-drinking and toast-munching

Or put another way, it tells the story of Alex and his droogs who indulge in ultra-violence. This sentence contains two of the most famous coinages from the book, written in a specially constructed slang which Burgess called Nadsat. This is the argot that Alex and his cohorts use to speak to each other, as well as to those they persecute, and any of the authority figures who attempt to intervene. It is heavily influenced by Russian, often taking a word from that language and anglicizing it, yet retaining something of the original pronunciation, such as chelloveck. This means fellow or person in Nadsat as well as in the original Russian chelovyek. The following sentence shows some of the other influences at work too.

I read this with care, my brothers, slurping away at the old chai, cup after tass after chasha, crunching my lomticks of black toast dipped in jammiwam and eggiweg.

Loosely, this describes Alex drinking cup after cup of tea, and eating slices of toast with jam and egg.  Chai is the Russian word for tea, but there are also parallels with the English slang word char; tass  is based on the French and  German words for cup (tasse and Tasse) and chasha has its origins in the Russian words for teacup (chashka)  and a poetical word for a large cup (chasha); lomtick reflects the Russian lomtik meaning slice;  both jammiwam and eggiweg are childish representations of jam and egg.

Only droogs?

What is most interesting about this, certainly from a lexicographic point of view, is that inventive as the words most undoubtedly are, few of them have made their way into common parlance. A Clockwork Orange is cited three times in the historical Oxford English Dictionary (although quotations for other Burgess works are also included). Two of the examples are for thou and your, which are of course extremely common words with long histories where Burgess is not the earliest example. The third is the aforementioned droog which was coined by Burgess in the novel and appears on the very first page of the book.

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim.

Droog is from another Russian word, drug, meaning friend. Its meaning in the book is probably a little more sinister than that – these are henchmen rather than just good pals. And this is the nuance of meaning that the word has taken on – that of a member of a street gang. None of the other coinages have (so far) made it into our dictionaries, or really into common speech.

Newspeak versus Nadsat

It is perhaps worth comparing A Clockwork Orange with another linguistically innovative book – Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell. The OED gives the following as Orwellianisms: doublethink, Newspeak, Oldspeak, and unperson. There is an obvious similarity between these words and any of the Nadsat words mentioned above – they are examples not of Standard English but of a created language: Newspeak. But they are different in at least one important way, and that may hold the key to why these words have made their way into English whereas most of the Nadsat ones have not. They described something for which there was no comparable word in English, whereas Nadsat is, for the most part, a form of slang, describing things for which there is already a word in English, but in a different way.

As a linguist, Burgess was apparently all too aware that slang can date rather quickly – consider words like groovy, which could root a book or character in a particular time unless it was being employed deliberately for humorous effect. By making up a new type of slang, he could ensure that the book  transcended the time in which it was written and is still all too relevant now, and probably will be in the future.

Everyone knows the power of an image

A striking image to illustrate what we write gives our work even greater impact – particularly if the picture is arresting and well-thought out. The skilful combination of words and images works.

So this month to celebrate the new edition of our bestselling Paperback Oxford English Dictionary, we are running a photography competition.

Take a photo which captures the word harmony. You can look up the definition of ‘harmony’ in our free online dictionary here.

The prize is a Panasonic Lumix DMC- FS35 camera. There are two runner-up prizes of the Oxford English Paperback Dictionary and the Rough Guide to Digital Photography. A selection of the best images will be posted in a gallery here on the OxfordWords blog.

It’s up to you how your picture relates to the word. Just include a caption describing the photograph and upload your image (maximum of 3MB) using the form below before 11.59 (GMT) on 11 June 2012. Please include your name as part of the file name of the image (eg. JohnSmith.jpg). Please read our terms and conditions before entering the competition.

You’ve heard of a writer called Lear?
His two hundredth birthday’s this year.
They called him absurd
But he wrote undeterred,
That remarkable writer called Lear.

If there were no other reason to remember Edward Lear with fondness (and there are, in fact, very many), his popularization of the limerick would be enough. Like so many children, I was always delighted to come across limericks. My favourite was about the young man of Nepal, who went to a fancy dress ball. He thought he would risk it and go as a biscuit – but a dog ate him up in the hall. Although the really good ones may take an awful lot of skill, just about anyone can write a limerick, and they can be adapted to just about any purpose, from the playful and innocent, to the downright obscene, to the pseudo-intellectual. (Winning a bottle of wine with a limerick about St. Neot designed to amuse a roomful of medievalists was probably my greatest success.)

Unlike more modern versions of the form (such as the tale of the Nepalese biscuit-man), Lear’s limericks weren’t usually jokes, in the sense of ending with an obvious punchline. Indeed, the last line of most of his limericks was often a simple near-repetition of the first:

There was an old man of Apulia,
Whose conduct was very peculiar;
For he fed twenty sons, upon nothing but buns,
That whimsical man of Apulia.

This says a lot about Lear’s sense of humour. It was nonsensical in the purest way: there was no especially clever purpose behind most of what he wrote, no knowing moments of “Aha!” as the reader realizes why a joke is amusing. Lear’s stories and verse are much more inclusive than that. The what of his stories, their simple content, is enough, without a why. You don’t need any special knowledge to find a pudding-shaped flea or a turkey performing wedding ceremonies funny.

That isn’t to say that Lear wasn’t clever with words, though. He was quite clearly an incurable word-player and punner. ‘Why must I suffer’, he exclaimed in one verse, ‘Roomattics in a vile cold attic room?’ The rheumatics and their cause are beautifully combined with nothing more than an inventive spelling. He also wrote about ‘higher-cynths’ and their companion flowers ‘lower-cynths’, and the ‘Seeze Pyder, an aquatic and ferocious creature truly dreadful to behold.’ I challenge anyone to think about hyacinths or sea spiders again without Lear’s versions popping unbidden into their minds.

 There once was an author called Edward,
Who looked disappointed, and said “Could
We please have better words
Than the ones that I’ve heard?”
So he made up his own – and they’re dead good.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that Lear isn’t one of the largest contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary’s bank of illustrative quotations. He may have coined piggy-wig, and runcible spoon (which now refers to a fork shaped like a spoon with a cutting edge), but apart from that, Lear’s input into the standard language appears to have been almost negligible. Generally speaking, nonsense words are, by their nature, not the kind of thing that a dictionary deals with. They are often undefinable, used by an individual writer as part of his or her linguistic repertoire, and don’t necessarily gain any wider currency. Still, I’m surely not alone in wishing that ‘scroobious’ or ‘plumdomphious’ could become part of our everyday language? I’m interested to know what these words bring to mind for other readers. To me, ‘plumdomphious’ has a definite feel of pomposity; when Lear describes how a Cauliflower ‘suddenly arose, and, in a somewhat plumdomphious manner, hurried off towards the setting sun’, I can clearly envisage a top-heavy and bumptious vegetable with somewhere most important to be. ‘Scroobious’, meanwhile, is perhaps best defined by Lear’s assertion that ‘it is impossible to imagine a more scroobious and unpleasant sound than that caused by the simultaneous sneezing of many millions of angry Mice.’ I would certainly appeal to any writers out there to reintroduce these words to the public consciousness.

Lear also had an excellent eye for real words that should, by any appropriate measure, be nonsense. A caption to one of his illustrations of his time in Crete, for example, describes how ‘the Landscape painter escapes (with difficulty) from an enraged Moufflon.’ ‘A Moufflon!’, I thought when I first read this. “Ha! That’s a good one.” But it turns out that the moufflon is one of those marvellous creatures which, like the duck-billed platypus, exists against all the odds of reason or suitability. And consider Lear’s description of some bottles which are ‘to be labelled with parchment or any other anti-congenial succedaneum.’ We can look up the (slightly archaic) dictionary meaning of these last words and find out that Lear probably means “any other different substitute”. But he manages to make these real words sound as strange and playful as ‘Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee!’, while a ‘globular foolish Topographer’ seems just as delightfully nonsensical as ‘the Pobble without any toes.’

The Pobble, incidentally, has been a source of some discussion in my house. My Friend the Doctor was quite convinced that ‘pobbling’ was the correct technical term for the amputation of toes. When I showed her the Lear verses about the Pobble, and also pointed out that ‘pobbling’ doesn’t seem to appear in any medical textbook, she had to consider the possibility that this meaning might just be a little joke by one of her colleagues. But I’d be really interested to know whether any other doctors refer to toe-amputation in this way. (Luckily, My Friend the Doctor is not an orthopaedic surgeon, so her haziness in this particular area of knowledge shouldn’t cause any serious accidents…)

Edward Lear’s prose and poetry never
Made very much sense whatsoever;
Yet critics deliriously
take it quite seriously,
Which proves that they’re not very clever.

While researching this article, I realised that writing about Edward Lear’s nonsense is something of a dangerous task. Having been well-trained, during my years as an English student, in the dark art of making Femino-Marxist post-deconstructivist readings of children’s stories, I’m wary of joining the ranks of the ‘pretentious people’ ridiculed by an Amazon.co.uk reviewer, who ‘can’t read too far’ into Lear’s poems. ‘They are just fun!’ the reviewer exclaims; you can hear the mocking, pitying laugh that accompanies these words. Nonetheless, I’m going to put my head just slightly above the parapet (luckily, I’m not parapetless, another of Lear’s rare word coinages in the OED) and say that, even at his most nonsensical, Lear can tell us something about the preoccupations of Victorian society.

Foreignness and the countries of the Empire feature quite prominently, for example. Take these lines:

She sits upon her Bulbul
Through the long long hours of night -
And o’er the dark horizon gleams
The Yashmack’s fitful light.

Or these, from his poem The Cummerbund:

Around her bower, with quivering leaves,
The tall Kamsamahs grew,
And Kitmutagars in wild festoons
Hung down from Tchokis blue.

A bulbul is a tropical songbird; a yashmack is a veil worn by Muslim women. Kamsamahs and kitmutagars are Indian domestic staff, and a tchoki is an Indian police station. Lear treats these non-English words as though they are nonsense, showing a delight in the exoticism that contact with other countries brought to British consciousness. A post-colonialist reading might, however, also identify a chauvinist tendency to objectify and belittle aspects of other cultures.

If we’re going to take the ‘pretentious’ approach to Lear’s nonsense, the old chestnut of gender relations must surely rear its head (a mixed metaphor, I know, but amidst all this Leariana, a chestnut with a head seems like the least of our worries.) His talking animals and objects, when female, are certainly often occupied in feeding their children and looking after their husbands, but it would seem churlish to read too much into this when we consider some of the feisty young ladies of the limericks. One, from Smyrna, ‘whose grandmother threatened to burn her’, responds with gusto: ‘she seized on the cat, and said, ‘Granny, burn that!’ A child of his times he may have been, but Lear never seems to derive anything other than enjoyment from the antics of either his male or female characters, however outrageous. When he describes a timid Soup-ladle, who ‘peeped through a heap of veal-patties, And squeaked with a ladle-like scream of surprise’, the pun on ‘lady-like’ seems more like a gentle mockery of traditional gender concepts than an attempt to enforce them (on either ladies or ladles).

While we can agree that Lear’s nonsense is fun, I think it would be a mistake to see it as ‘just fun’ and nothing else. It is fun with a gentle cleverness, fun with some of the prejudices of its age, fun that pushes the boundaries of an already-varied language in order to inspire and amuse. Two hundred years to the day after Lear’s birth, it’s no surprise that he’s still a favourite amongst people of all ages, a man whose modest influence on the language is more than made up for by his influence on the British sense of humour. As an epitaph, nobody could do better than W. H. Auden’s conclusion to his poem Edward Lear: ‘children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.’

We’re very happy (the 259^th most looked-up word) here at Oxford Dictionaries to see that you are exploiting the full potential (the 183^rd most looked-up word) of our online dictionary by looking up a variety of words. From those tricky to spell words (vulnerable, environment, acquire) to checking the definition of easily confused words (affect and effect, compromise and comprise), and finding out the meaning of less commonly used words (ubiquitous, egregious, oligarch), you really have made full use of Oxford Dictionaries Online.

You did manage to throw in a few surprises – just to keep us on our toes. Swag made an unanticipated appearance in the top 20, along with an old favourite: floccinaucinihilipilification (try saying that one quickly!). Even more unexpectedly, wether (meaning ‘castrated ram’) featured in the top 30 lookups. Whether you were in fact looking for whether or weather, we won’t ever know. Or perhaps you have a keen interest in ovine-related topics?

What was the most looked-up word in April?

Cue drum roll… The most popular search term in Oxford Dictionaries Online last month was kawaii. Our top lookup of 2011, meaning ‘cute’, has retained its crown, once again appearing at the top of the list. The historical Oxford English Dictionary has dated the use of this Japanese loanword in English back to 1965, with the first-known citation appearing in the New York Times: “When East meets West Japanese call it kawaii”.

Over to you…

Now it’s your chance to explore. Below is a word cloud containing the top 300 most looked-up words in Oxford Dictionaries Online. Hover over the words to find out more or click on the words to be taken to the dictionary entry. Click on the refresh button to discover more of your top looked-up words.

When we are unsure of the meaning of a word, or want to know when it was first used, or what alternative spellings it has, we consult the dictionary. People often refer to “the dictionary,” as if there were only one, or as if it didn’t matter which one was consulted. But then most households probably only have one dictionary of any size, though consultation via computers, tablets, or smartphones is becoming increasingly common. Reference works of this kind hide in the light. They are so obviously present as resources, waiting to be consulted, that we don’t often think about them as topics in their own right. But the history of dictionary-making is as complicated and intriguing as any other history. Once we penetrate the sheer authoritative presence of a dictionary, we often find the human fragility of failures, wrong turns, conflict, and uncertainty.

The Oxford Latin Dictionary is no exception to this generalization. A new Latin dictionary was commissioned by Oxford University Press in 1875, but abandoned in the following decade, and an American book by Charlton Lewis and Charles Short adopted instead. Work began on Oxford Latin Dictionary in 1933, but it was not finally published until 1982. Why did it take nearly fifty years to put together? The first editor appointed, Alexander Souter, made slow progress, his sample entries were savaged by the press’s learned advisers, and he was retired in 1939. World War II dispersed the staff and slowed progress to a snail’s pace. Souter’s successor, James Wyllie, was a talented lexicographer but proved difficult to deal with and was dismissed after a mental breakdown in 1954. From then until his death in 1971, Wyllie issued a long series of visionary pamphlets. He was succeeded by Peter Glare, a safe pair of hands, who saw the project through to completion.

Another factor which made for slow progress was that the Oxford Latin Dictionary was assembled from scratch, from a fresh reading of Latin texts. In this it followed the strategy of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), whose main sequence was completed after fifty years of work in 1928. The two dictionaries were also linked as products of the same lexicographical factory, assembled by OUP in the 1880s and housed in the Dictionary Room at the Old Ashmolean Museum in Oxford since 1903. (It also housed the team working on the revision of Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, published in parts between 1925 and 1940.) The decision to start work on the Oxford Latin Dictionary was in fact motivated in part by a concern to provide employment for the staff of OED after it completed publication. This is a useful reminder that dictionaries are not just reference resources for readers. Their preparation involves large-scale projects and demands considerable investment of time, staff, and money.

The history of dictionary-making is littered with unfinished projects. The roll of books begun but never completed is a long one, and looking at it makes one appreciate how remarkable it was that OED and the Oxford Latin Dictionary were completed. In fact in the 1890s, when economic depression reduced the Press’s overall profits and the OED’s costs soared, it came close to being cancelled.

The histories I’ve mentioned are internal ones, but dictionaries are published in a competitive marketplace, and their success or failure depends in part on the nature of the competition. American readers may be familiar with the long-running battles between Noah Webster and Joseph Worcester in the nineteenth century, or between Merriam-Webster and Funk and Wagnall in the twentieth. In both cases, the publication of a massive dictionary by one firm was soon followed by the appearance of a bigger and (allegedly) better book from its rival.

The Oxford Latin Dictionary is in the unusual position of having no obvious rival, certainly in English-speaking countries. The same goes for its sister dictionary, Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. ‘Liddell and Scott’ has acquired a lot of stories since its first appearance in 1843. It had two editors, and was known to some users as ‘our two friends’ — though Liddell, when challenged about an entry, was reputed to have replied, “Scott wrote that part.” And of course Liddell was the father of Alice in Wonderland. But the history of the Oxford Latin Dictionary has its own stories and, as new readers engage with it, will surely gain more.

This article originally appeared on the OUPblog.

But this penchant for accentuation is nothing new, and of course it’s not restricted to emails, blogs, or social networking sites. I’ve recently been immersed in a thought-provoking book by Guy Deutscher, about the forces that drive language change. Deutscher outlines three main instigators of linguistic development:

• economy (our  inclination to create short-cuts so as to communicate with less effort)
• analogy (the built-in desire to create linguistic regularity, e.g. saying ‘two gooses’ rather than ‘two geese’)
• expressiveness

It’s the final one of these, expressiveness, which leads speakers and writers to try to load their communications with as much emphasis as possible to ensure they get their meaning across to their listeners or readers loud and clear. This is perfectly fine most of the time and we have a range of ways to do this, all of which display commendable human inventiveness when it comes to linguistic expression.

1. There are many adverbs and adjectives that we can call on:

I was utterly exhausted by the process every day.
All of the anger he feels is certainly understandable.
She had a terrible pain in her back.

2.   Sometimes we use stacks of synonyms:

There is absolutely no excuse – none, zip, zero, nada – for not including these commentaries on the DVDs.

3.   We can bring in reinforcements in the shape of extra sentences or phrases:

- So there are contradictions here, aren’t there?
- Yes, sure, absolutely. You say it so well.

Here comes the grammar bit…

So if adding emphasis is OK most of the time, when is it a grammatical no-no? Well, this brings us back to the ‘very, extremely, highly, really, most unique opportunity’ in the deliberately OTT title of this article. Take a look at emphatic method number 1 above: the first two examples show adjectives (exhausted and understandable) being modified (in this case, having their meaning made stronger), by the adverbs utterly and certainly. There are many such adverbs: very, really, more, greatly, highly, extremely, and most are just a few examples. Conversely, adverbs such as less, fairly, and rather can be used to make the meanings of adjectives weaker:

It may be less cold on Friday.
The plot of the movie is fairly simple.

All such adverbs are part of our everyday linguistic toolkit: we don’t usually think twice before using them (and nor should we). But beware! Adjectives can be divided into various categories, one of which is gradable and non-gradable (or absolute).

• Gradable adjectives, such as hungry, fat, or cold, are those which have degrees or levels of intensity, size, etc.: you can be very hungry, in the coldest place on Earth, or less fat than your friend. This means that gradable adjectives have comparative (hungrier, fatter, colder) and superlative forms (hungriest, fattest, coldest) and you can strengthen or diminish these adjectives with adverbs such as very, rather, more, less, fairly, and so on.
• Absolute adjectives, such as dead, ballistic, or spherical, are those which don’t have degrees: you can’t be rather dead (you either are or you’re not), a missile isn’t very ballistic, and a basketball isn’t less spherical than a tennis ball. So it follows that absolute adjectives don’t have comparatives or superlatives and you can’t usually apply intensifying adverbs such as really or very to them.

However, sometimes the situation isn’t so cut and dried. There’s a set of adjectives (including perfect, infinite, and unique) which fall into both categories, gradable and absolute. These words have a central or original meaning which represents a philosophically or mathematically absolute concept, but they’ve also developed new and less precise meanings.

Warning: random hyperbole generator at work!

This is where many language traditionalists start to get irritated, and their main source of annoyance is what they regard as the ‘misuse’ of unique as a gradable adjective, qualified with very, more, extremely and similar adverbs (or even, shock horror, being compared – uniquer?, uniquest??). This is because the core meaning of unique is ‘being the only one of its kind’:  as human beings, we are all unique because not a single one of us is exactly the same as the other genetically. In this meaning, then, unique is an absolute adjective which can’t be modified by very, most, extremely, etc.: logically, something is either one of a kind or it’s not. Here are a couple of correctly used examples of unique in this core sense:

√ Restrict your wireless network to known Media Access Connection (MAC) addresses, which are unique identifiers for every hardware device.

√ One particular antioxidant that’s unique to coffee may protect against Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

But language change being what it is, unique has developed a weaker, less precise meaning: ‘very remarkable, special, or unusual’. The historical Oxford English Dictionary first records this sense in the 19^th century, and it’s now well established. The ‘very remarkable or special’ meaning is not an absolute concept and is therefore gradable, so it’s grammatically acceptable to use modifying adverbs:

√  I saw a guy wearing some really unique eyeglasses.

√  They’ve devised a highly unique way to cook and serve meals.

Because our brains seem to have this instinctive ‘hyperbole generator’ which makes us want to reinforce our utterances, we try to ‘boost’ words like unique, even when used in their core sense (when, strictly speaking, they’re not gradable), with modifying adverbs. This will most definitely incur the wrath of traditionalists and should be avoided in good English:

X The special bedding package is very unique to our hotel.

You should also be aware that the secondary meaning of unique is disliked by some language traditionalists and others. For one thing, it’s completely overused (especially in advertising and marketing) which tends to devalue it and weaken it still further, thereby encouraging us to use more emphasizing  adverbs so as to strengthen it again – and so the cycle continues. So when writing in formal contexts, follow the sensible advice given in Pocket Fowler’s Modern English Usage:

If a rule is needed, prudence suggests that the weakened meaning should be used sparingly. In informal and conversational language, however, a broader range of meaning is permissible.