Before anyone flagellates me, let me just add that I’m probably just as OCD as many of the other folks commenting here, if not moreso. It’s just that I come from a different background.

Specifically, my background is in mathematics and the physical sciences. Just because something is unique doesn’t necessarily mean that what makes that thing unique is in any way noteworthy. For example, suppose we have two ingots of some rare metal which have the same mass and every other characteristic that we might care about, but one has a different identifier engraved on it from the other. The thing that makes these ingots unique, then, is an identifier — this is a trivial difference, and for our purposes makes no real difference whatsoever. It doesn’t have to be engraving; the difference could just as easily be geometric (e.g., one ingot is a rectangular solid, while the other is a cylinder).

In cases like this, it’s not uncommon to say that these objects are trivially unique (some state variable is different, but it’s one that won’t affect measurements we care about). You can only say that the ingots are not unique if you completely ignore all gross physical traits.

By analogy, then, if there’s a trivial form of uniqueness, there should be a “strong” form of uniqueness. I’ve seen the intensifier “very” applied in situations where a sample or a result really did stand out from the crowd, and not in just a trivial or inconsequential manner. I’ll concede that in more formal writing, the same students and researchers might prefer the term “singular” or “statistically significant” since the term “unique” gets overloaded quite a bit.

I suppose the point I’m trying to make in all this is that there’s unique, and then there’s unique, and it’s all relative to the manner (kind) and degree of that uniqueness. While every snowflake might be unique, no one snowflake is really any more special than any other, whereas in a population of animals with random mutations, the one animal that has a beneficial mutation which confers a reproductive advantage could be considered truly special.

Maybe in my previous paragraph, “very unique” would still rankle purists out there. But if there’s a notion of trivial uniqueness, shouldn’t there be a stronger, more intense version of uniqueness to indicate “unique in a way that I actually care about (and you should too)”?

I say:”That’s so unique” all that time.

It’s really great to learn stuff like that!

Thank you