Too unilateral:

One of InstaPundit’s readers complains to the Washington Post about one of their articles:

In addition to the selective inaccurate quoting, the Post’s copy editors didn’t catch the Copy Editing 101 glitch in the piece. A policy can’t be “too unilateral.” It’s either unilateral or it’s not. There are no degrees of unilateral, just as there are no degrees of unique.

     Don’t let the man read the Preamble to the Constitution, which talks about forming “a more perfect union.” In fact, things can be more round, more perfect, more unilateral, and more unique; that’s just shorthand for “more nearly round,” “more nearly perfect,” “more nearly unilateral,” or “more nearly unique.” In the words of Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, quoting James C. Fernald, English Grammar Simplified (1946):

Adjectives expressing some quality that does not admit of degrees are not compared when used in their strict or full sense . . . .

But such adjectives are often used in a modified or approximate sense, and when so used admit of comparison.

If we say, “This is more perfect than that,” we do not mean that either is perfect without limitation, but that “this” has “more” of the qualities that go to make up perfection than “that”; it is more nearly perfect. Such usage has high literary authority[.]

     Now I actually don’t like “more unique”; it sounds imprecise and clumsy to me. I probably wouldn’t like “more perfect,” either, outside the Preamble, though that would likely be because it sounds a bit archaic. But sometimes there’s just no very quick synonym that’s more literally precise. And in any event, that something sounds inelegant doesn’t mean that it’s ungrammatical.

     (Note also that “too unilateral” may sometimes mean “unilateral in too many instances,” though that wasn’t the Post‘s usage.)