Last week I was widely quoted in the press referring to the Heller case involving the constitutionality of the DC Gun ban as:
one of the only cases in our lifetime when the Supreme Court is going to interpret an important provision of our Constitution unencumbered by precedent.
As soon as the quote appeared, I received a couple emails correcting my use of “one of the only.” As one correspondent wrote:
You’re quoted in the morning’s [Washington Post], p. 1, above the fold: “This may be one of the only cases ….” Eeeek! What, pray tell, does “one of the only X” mean?! One hears it all the time, but parse it if you will, and see what you get.
A few minutes later, another wrote:
Let me introduce you to a useful word: few. As in,,,this may be one of the few cases in our lifetime…. In view of your substitution of “only,” it bears mention that the oft-abused “unique” means one of a kind. Mitchell Strickler, Yale Law 1961
But then the emails stopped. So I was taken aback when the Sunday Boston Globe ran an entire column, entitled “Almost Unique,” analyzing the correctness of my usage:
AS THE DISTRICT of Columbia’s gun ban squared off against the Second Amendment last week, Georgetown University constitutional scholar Randy Barnett was widely quoted on the momentousness of the event: “This may be one of the only cases in our lifetime when the Supreme Court is going to be interpreting . . . an important provision of the Constitution unencumbered by precedent.”
Objection! e-mailed reader Sue Bass of Belmont. “One of the only cases” doesn’t make sense, she protested; it should logically be “one of the few.”
After listing several authorities in support of the criticism, the column then turns to an interesting defense of the usage:
But one of the only has its defenders. James Kilpatrick, in “Fine Print,” points out that it is no less logical than one of the best or one of the most talented. “The best advice I can offer is to shake your head and get on with what you are writing,” he concludes.
Earlier usage gurus are silent on the topic, though there’s some indirect evidence of their attitude. For instance, the critic Edmund Wilson, reviewing a1940s potboiler, observed that “one of the only attempts at a literary heightening of effect is the substitution for the simple ‘said’ of other, more pretentious verbs” like “shrilled” and “barked.”
Usage maven Sir Ernest Gowers liked this quote enough – despite its use of “one of the only” – that he included it in his 1965 edition of Fowler’s “Modern English Usage,” as a comment on “said.”
How long has this been going on? A Google Books search dates one of the only to the 1770s, when a traveler reported that “business, and making money, is one of the only employments” of Rotterdam. But only was already losing its singularity. The 1989 Oxford English Dictionary gave the sense “one (or, by extension, two or more), of which there exist no more . . . of the kind,” and quoted Sir Philip Sidney, in the 16th century, using “the only two.”
This expansive sense of “only” is not just an Anglo-Saxon aberration. In “Swann’s Way,” Proust’s narrator says that a certain day was “one of the only” (“un des seuls”) on which he was not unhappy. In German, according to University of Wisconsin professor Joseph Salmons, one of the only (eine der einzigen, etc.) is entirely OK.
Multilinguist Steve Dodson, at the blog Language Hat, said one of the only is common in Russian and in Spanish (un de los