Comments on: More on ‘one of the only’

By: mollymooly

mollymooly — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:17:15 +0000

@Anthony Pick: I really doubt Waitrose is claiming to be _the_ only company.

“One of the only n things that foo my bar” is the same as “one of only n things that foo my bar” or “one of the n things that foo my bar”.

“One of the only things that foo my bar” is the same as “one of the few things that foo my bar”.

“One of the only” is not unidiomatic or illogical or ungrammatical, but it is puffery. I associate it with advertising or fansites seeking to puff up their product with claims that sound better at first than they really are on closer scrutiny.

By: JJM

JJM — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 15:30:38 +0000

“The superfluous ‘one of’ arises either because of the writer’s wish to emphasise the uniqueness of the identity, or, more likely, because he/she is writing as he/she speaks, a common failing.”

Hmm. To me, “superfluous” would imply “unnecessary.” I think “redundant” might be more appropriate since redundancy is used in most languages for emphasis* – and that’s what is at the heart of the matter here.

* The common prescriptivist complaint against the double negative is that the extra negative particle makes a statement somehow positive (as if mathematical laws could be applied to grammatical conventions).

They miss the point: that redundant extra particle serves to make the statement even more emphatically negative.

Mobster to court room: “I ain’t sayin’ nothin’.”

Does anyone honestly believe this means the guy is cleverly suggesting he will say something?

By: Graham

Graham — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:55:16 +0000

Maxwell says that “few” and “only” are synonymous. If that is the case, all my dictionaries must be very much out of date.
He points out that Google has 429,000 examples of “one of the only”. The first two that come up on my browser are blogs arguing the toss as we are doing now. Google also has over 4 million hits for “one of the few”, i.e. ten times as many.
The internet is full of mistakes, as we know, so it is difficult to make a good argument for the grammaticality of a structure from the number of hits.

By: Anthony Pick

Anthony Pick — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 08:56:03 +0000

“Only” is an adverb derived from “one”. Applied to a predicate, it means that there is one instance of an identity, state, or action, not more than one, for the respective subject. “John is my only friend”, means that I do not have two. “John is my only friend who speaks French” means that I do not have another friend who speaks that language. Waitrose’s sentence therefore means “We’re the only Internet provider to donate all our profits to charity”. The superfluous “one of” arises either because of the writer’s wish to emphasise the uniqueness of the identity, or, more likely, because he/she is writing as he/she speaks, a common failing.

By: Maxwell

Maxwell — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 03:15:18 +0000

It is true to say “if something is already singular, you cannot then have “one of” it.” However, that is not what is happening in “one of the only internet service providers”. The ’s’ on ‘providers’ is the clue; it’s a plural, obviously.

You can have one of a group of things: ‘I’ll have one of the apples over there’. Why should that change when the group is modified by “only”, i.e. where the group is alone of its kind?

Further to that, you surely don’t deny the grammaticality of “the only internet service providers to donate all their profits to charity”, as far as noun phrases with infinitival clauses go. And so there is nothing ungrammatical about either part, you must be suggesting that when combined they are somehow more ungrammatical than their sum. “one of” and “only” are serving different semantic functions – the first selecting from the group, the second defining the nature of the group – and so there’s no contradiction and no ungrammaticality.

Just because it could be “few” doesn’t mean it’s a misuse in the same way the use of any word instead of its synonym isn’t a misuse. It’s a choice of the speaker – perhaps based on aesthetics because of the slight alliteration of “one of the only”, but otherwise just a choice of the speaker. “few” may be preferred by some – you, clearly – but they are synonymous and so the use of “only” cannot be a misuse. Unless you argue that we should have one word for everything and deny natural synonymy. At which point I’ve no way to argue.

I seem to be supported in believing it to be a grammatical thing by the internet at large (429,000 examples of the thing on google), the New York Times, etc, regardless of venue or ostensible style. I had honestly never even doubted the phrase before, it seemed so obviously grammatical. I suppose it’s less obvious that I had assumed, but I still think it fine.

As an aside, “plus” is clearly a conjunction, then, regardless of the limited examples they give you, and so functions identically to ‘and’, allowing for commas at the end of the clause immediately preceding it.