My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Winkle. Don’t laugh - this is a relatively common name in the Potteries, and presumably originates in the place name Wincle, which is a village in Cheshire. The Oxford Names Companion gives two possible etymologies of the place name: “Hill of a man called *Wineca”, or “Hill by a bend”. OE personal name + hyll, or wince + hyll.

When I started researching this part of my family history, I spent a cold afternoon in a church vestry copying out all the relevant birth marriage and death entries in the Registers, and noted that some of the entries had the spelling “Wintle”. I was interested, but not surprised, because a feature of the Potteries dialect is the merging of the consonant clusters /tl/ and /kl/ as /tl/. (It is common, for instance, to hear people talking about “pittled onions”.) I assumed, therefore, that the vicar, not being a native of the Potteries, was hearing “Wintle” and spelling the name accordingly, despite the regular local spelling being “Winkle”. I continued to collect references to the Winkle families of the district for some years, including all the entries in the censuses from 1841 to 1881. I noticed, however, that ‘my’ family appeared not to be listed before 1881, even though my great grandfather was already 45 at that time. The light began to dawn with the discovery in the 1881 census that my great grandfather was born in the Forest of Dean. Down in Gloucestershire, the name that is common is Wintle, and I now found that he had moved to the Potteries some time after 1851, when he was 15. He married, as Wintle, in 1859. He and his growing family are all listed in the censuses of 1861 and 1871 as Wintle.

My assumption about the dialectal confusion had been correct, but the wrong way round: by the time of my grandmother’s birth in 1877, the registrar had heard my great grandfather say “Wintle”, but had assumed that this was his dialectal way of saying “Winkle”, and registered my grandmother under that spelling. The whole family became “Winkle” by 1881, and when my great grandparents died, within two weeks of each other in 1924 - after 65 years of marriage, made even more remarkable by the fact that my great grandfather had been a coalminer - they were both buried as “Winkle”.

So even in an age when literacy was spreading very fast, the spelling of family names could still be affected by local dialectal considerations.

Definitions of adjectival “only” from recent dictionaries:

“alone of its or their kind; single or solitary” (Compact Oxford English Dictionary for Students)

“used to say that there is one person, thing or group in a particular situation and no others” (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English)

“single in number; without others of the kind; without others worth considering” (The Chambers Dictionary)

What all these definitions stress is the singularity of only, whether referring to one item or a singular group. If something is already singular, you cannot then have “one of” it.

Neal gives the sentence The 100 people in this organization are the only ones who know. This is covered by the Longman definition quoted above (”one group in a particular situation and no others”) .

Maxwell suggests we replace only by solitary in Waitrose’s statement, but for me that doesn’t make any more sense. He also says that if we remove the word only, the sentence is perfect. Of course it is: it is the juxtaposition of only and one of the that I cannot accept. Make it “Waitrose is one of only five IPs …” and I have no problem, or even “… one of only a few …”, “… one of the few …”.

In Waitrose’s statement, internet providers is qualified by only, but what does only mean in this position? If it means ‘few’, then they should have written ‘few’. If it means what the dictionaries all seem to say it means, then it is being misused.

Maxwell also suggests that I may be denying the existence of idiom. Of course not, but idiom also needs to be fitted to the style or register of the language being used. In a fairly formal style like the one that Waitrose is employing, care needs to be taken that the target audience will not be able to find fault with it. Inappropriate use of language often leads to a dismissive response by the readers or listeners.

Plus is defined in the dictionaries quoted above as an “informal” conjunction, but all the examples given show it as the first word of a sentence, not preceded by a comma.

“We offer a fast, reliable, honestly priced connection, plus we’re one of the only internet providers in the UK to donate all our profits to charity.”

This is the claim of Waitrose.com.

It’s amazing how anyone can really think that “one of” and “only” can come together in the same sentence. A moment’s thought must bring the realization that “one of” anything must be one chosen from a group which contains others, whereas “only” means quite clearly “the one and only”. So is Waitrose the only internet provider in the UK to donate all profits to charity, or is it one of the (?)few, (?)many IPs so to do?

The fact that “one of the only” is a common phrase, found everywhere, does not make it acceptable English. It is understandable in the spoken language, where we change our mind half way through many if not most of the sentences we utter, but in supposedly thoughtful written language, it should be amended to something more meaningful.

The punctuation of Waitrose’s statement is also less than perfect: there should be at least a semi-colon, if not a full stop, before the word “plus”.