My Dad won’t mind me mentioning that he’s a bit of a pedant when it comes to the way we use language (goodness only knows what he makes of my use of the ‘Mother Tongue’)!

When we were kids, we were constantly being told ‘you can only have less of a homogeneous substance’ – it was a ticking off for saying ‘I’ve got less friends than her’ or some such. It would be followed by ‘do you mean FEWER friends’?

We could never get away with ‘im – ‘what’s happened to the h?’ and when Star Trek came on – well, TO BOLDLY GO – split infinitive!!! As for use of a sentence like ‘a dress to die for’ – well, just imagine the colour of his face from that one!!! (Sorry Dad – I hope you don’t mind me saying this, you know I love you!)

Another thing he was very critical of was the use of the word ‘unique’. It irked and riled him that people almost unerringly use it in a way that suggests you can have ‘degrees’ of uniqueness. I cannot possibly recount the number of times he would yell (either at the TV or one of us) ‘you can’t have degrees of uniqueness, something is either unique or it is not!’

Today I’ve been at a client meeting with two colleagues from another team within our group. The senior team member would have got my Dad in a right old lather. She’s designed a questionnaire and administered it among a load of highly intelligent beings (dermatologists and GPs) and one of the questions was ‘how unique do you think this claim is?’ and her scale went from ‘not at all unique’ to ‘completely unique’. I actually had to dig my fingernails into the palms of my hands to stop the laughter welling up. Not really laughing at her but more laughing about how my Dad would respond!!!

So, here is a photo of something that’s not unique! There are four more of these books in existence, so it’s not semi-unique or pseudo-unique, it’s simply NOT unique……


Phew rock and roll - this time last year, I was ON FIRE! and two years ago, I was thinking about guarding the City of London - funny how that theme is recurring now!