A reader named Steve Fahnestalk writes to say: “Hey, Ken. Please consider eliminating the phrase ‘one of the only,’” (which I used in Tuesday Trivia this week,) “from your vocabulary. Being an ‘only’ is like being pregnant, unique, or boneless. You can’t be a little of any of those. You either are or you aren’t.”

This was news to me. Of course I’ve heard people bitch about “very unique” before, but “one of the only”? I was excited that science had developed a new grammatical pet peeve.

But hold on a second. The only reference Mr. “Finest-talk” cites is Paul Brians, a “retired professor of English at Washington State,” and a UW fan like myself knows that this Wazoo “professor” is probably just some cow-town old-timer who tried to change his name to “Brains” and misspelled it.

But it turns out Dr. Brians is not alone! Randy Barnett at the Volokh Conspiracy got angry emails after he used the phrase “one of the only” on the front page of the Washington Post, which outcry led to a full-page column in the Boston Globe!

The Globe finds uses of “one of the only” dating back to the 18th century, and, in fact, my Merriam-Webster’s 11th lists the third sense of “only” as “few,” which would seem to settle the point unless “only” defenders view this as a recent cave to the ungrammatical unwashed.

Maybe this is as good a time to any to confess that I don’t even mind modifiers like “more” or “less” with “unique” either. Who says uniqueness is binary? My dog Banjo is unique; genetically, no other Lab/golden mix is quite like him. But if I had a two-headed dog, or a neon-green dog, wouldn’t that be more unique somehow? Certainly he’d be unique in more senses, or more obviously unique. Why shouldn’t “more unique” cover the concept of being “more broadly unique”? I guess I have to turn in my grammar-Nazi card now.