Tag Archives: unique

The Missing Day

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Sorry, I missed a day yesterday. It started badly when we arrived at our planned breakfast stop to find it shut, though the website said it was open. Then we got caught in a cloudburst, couldn’t find a suitable replacement and eventually ended up in Stoke on Trent late, wet and(in my case) extremely grumpy.

Apart from that it was a good day, as these things go. All the small potteries and backstreet shops have gone now and they have been replaced by well lit shops staffed by loud and smiling women. They are not my sort of place, and judging by the price tags, they are not the sort of place where you will find a bargain either. I do not know how people can seriously contemplate buying a circle of glazed clay for some of the prices on display when all you are going to do is cover it with gravy, saw away with a knife and then drop it in a bowl of water with a load of other stuff. In one shop, the cheapest we could find was £9 a plate, and they were seconds!

The strap line for one link to pottery at the Portmerion Seconds Shop actually says “Our Usual Quality At Lower Prices. Shop Unique Pottery Pieces Today!” You probably know what is coming next. How can it be usual quality when it is a second? Unless their usual quality is second grade. But then, it would be their usual quality and it wouldn’t be in a seconds shop. Somebody in the advert department is obviously fluent in Gobbledygook rather than English. And as for the “unique” pieces . . . Unique has one meaning in the dictionary. A unique meaning, in fact. It means there is only one of them. I’d stretch a point to allow them to mean there was only one example in the shop. But there wasn’t. There were dozens, even hundreds of everything. Unique doesn’t mean, rare or unusual or, as in this case, well lit and expensive. It means there is just one. If there are two of them it isn’t unique.

I’m becoming curmudgeonly, so I will stop.

The header picture is from one of our previous visits, as is the bottom one. I did take some others yesterday but will use them later. Stoke has always had an element of decay about it, which has been part of the charm over the years, but this is all disappearing as developers build more and more homes and retail parks.

When we got home I slept, ate and slept again before going to bed. With the addition of a few slivers of TV in my waking moments that was all I did.

Derelict factory in Stoke

Day 67

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I heard back from one of my other submissions. Another acceptance. Too easy. Something bad must happen soon. I will become complacent, or editors will realise that deep down I am not worth publishing . . .

Success can be  a troublesome thing to deal with. My previous four attempts were turned down on the basis of obscurity, being late and not being good enough (twice). In some ways I find that easier to deal with, which is really the wrong way round. You often see articles about how to cope with rejection, but nothing about how to cope with success. Maybe I should write that as an article – it would be more original than another one about coping with rejection.

That’s a question – is it possible to be “more original” or is it like pregnancy and uniqueness? You can’t be “more pregnant” or “slightly pregnant”. You can, according to some people be “nearly unique” , “almost unique” and various other types of unique, but they all really mean “not unique” and are a misuse of the word. I saw one example on eBay that was properly used but hilarious in context.

Someone ha listed an item as “rare”. This, in eBay speak just means “I have not seen one before”. Five sales down the page was another of these rare items, which tends to suggest they may not be rare. The second one, which made me laugh, was described as “unique”. Clearly it wasn’t.

And that’s what made me think about my statement above – can you be “more original”?, Or is it simply “original” or “not original”? Have I fallen into sloppy writing habits?

What do you think?

Stone on the Floor