People pop in fairly regularly to complain about “one of the only”, which I’m just really not that interested in. Usually the complaints are in response to my argument a few years ago that it was perfectly grammatical and interpretable (specifically rebutting Richard Lederer’s silly claim that only is equivalent to one and therefore is inappropriate for referring to multiple items). I haven’t gotten as many only=one complaints lately, but I’ve now received a new objection, presented as part of a comment by Derek Schmidt:
When [only] precedes a noun used in plural, it implies that there are no other similar items that belong to the list. “The only kinds of writing utensils on my desk are pencils and pens and highlighters.” […] But I have many of those pens, so if someone asked if they could borrow a pen, and I said, “No, that’s one of the only writing utensils on my desk!” that would be a little disingenuous and if someone was standing at my desk and saw the number of writing utensils, they would be baffled and think me a fool. Rightly so. Because they would understand it (logically, even) as meaning “that’s one of the few”, which is very false. So… “one of the only” means about as much as “one of them”.
To buttress his point, he referred me to a grammar column in the Oklahoman, which I never grow tired of noting was once called the “Worst Newspaper in America” by the Columbia Journalism Review. That was 14 years ago now, and I sometimes wonder if it is fair to keep bringing this up. Then I read Gene Owens’s grammar column in it and I wish the CJR had been harsher.*
About one example of “one of the only”, Owens writes:
“Now I can understand if he were the only English speaker or if he were only one of a few English speakers,” Jerry said, “but I don’t know how he could be one of the only English speakers.” That’s easy, Jerry. If he was any English speaker at all, he was one of the only English speakers in the area. In fact, he was one of the only English speakers in the world. […] The TV commentator probably meant “one of the few English speakers in the area.” But even if the colonel was “one of the many English speakers in the area,” he still was one of the only ones.
It continues on in this vein for a while, and but his point seems to be approximately the same as Schmidt’s, boiling down to the following statements:
- It is grammatical to say “one of the only”.
- It is used regularly in place of “one of the few”.
- Examining it literally, one could say “one of the only” to describe something that there are many of.
- This would be a strange situation to use it in.
- Therefore “one of the only” oughtn’t be used in the case where it wouldn’t be strange.
Up till the last sentence, I agree. In fact, I don’t think any of those points are controversial.** But the last sentence is a big leap, and one that we demonstrably don’t make in language. Would it be silly of me to say:
(1) I have three hairs on my head.
Thankfully I’m still young and hirsute enough to have many more than three hairs on my head, and I think we’d all agree it would be a silly statement. But, parsing it literally, it is true: I do have three hairs on my head, though in addition I have another hundred thousand. In case this is such a weird setting that you don’t agree it’s literally true, here’s another example:
(2) Some of the tomatoes I purchased are red.
If I show you the bin of cherry tomatoes I just bought, and they’re all red, am I lying? No, not literally. But I am being pragmatically inappropriate — you expect “some” to mean “some but not all”, just as you expect “three” to generally mean “three and no more”. These are examples of what’s known as a scalar implicature: we expect people to use the most restrictive form available (given their knowledge of the world), even though less restrictive forms may be consistent too.***
To return to Schmidt’s example, it may be truthful but absurd to protest that one of 30 pens on my desk is “one of my only pens”. But just because the truth value is the same when I protest that one of two pens on my desk is “one of my only pens”, this doesn’t mean that the pragmatic appropriateness doesn’t change either. Upon hearing “one of the only”, the listener knows, having never really heard this used to mean “one of many”, that pragmatically it will mean “one of the (relatively) few”.
There is, perhaps, nothing in the semantics to block its other meanings, but no one ever uses it as such, just as no one ever says they have three hairs when they have thousands. This is a strong constraint on the construction, one that people on both sides of the argument can agree on. I guess the difference is whether you view this usage restriction as evidence of people’s implicit linguistic knowledge (as I do) or as evidence of people failing to understand their native language (as Schmidt & Owens do).
Finally, and now I’m really splitting hairs, I’m not convinced that “one of the only” can always be replaced by “one of the few”, as the literalists suggest. If we’re being very literal, at what point do we have to switch off of few? I wouldn’t have a problem with saying “one of the only places where you can buy Cherikee Red“, even if there are hundreds of such stores, because relative to the number of stores that don’t sell it, they’re few. But saying “one of the few” when there’s hundreds? It doesn’t bother me, but I’d think it’d be worse to a literalist than using “one of the only”, whose only problem is that it is too true.
Summary: If a sentence could theoretically be used to describe a situation but is never used to describe such a situation, that doesn’t mean that the sentence is inappropriate or ungrammatical. It means that people have strong pragmatic constraints blocking the usage, exactly the sort of thing that we need to be aware of in a complete understanding of a language.
—
*: I am being unfair. Owens’s column is at least imaginative, and has an entire town mythos built up over the course of his very short columns. But I never understand what grammatical point he’s trying to make in them, and as far as I can tell, I’d disagree with it if I did. As for the “worst newspaper” claim, this was largely a result of the ownership of the paper by the Gaylord family, who thankfully sold it in 2011, though the CJR notes it’s still not great.
**: Well, it might be pragmatically appropriate to use “one of the few” in cases where the number of objects is large in absolute number but small relative to the total, such as speaking about a subset of rocks on the beach or something. I’m not finding a clear example of this, but I don’t want to rule it out.
***: Scalar implicatures were first brought to my attention when one of my fellow grad students (now a post-doc at Yale), Kate Davidson, was investigating them in American Sign Language. Here’s an (I hope fairly accessible and interesting) example of her research in ASL scalar implicature.
Motivated Grammar 
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August 19, 2013 at 6:06 pm
David L. Gold
In my opinion, “one of the only” does not make sense and just “one of the few,” “one of a small number of,” and, if there are any, similar wordings are right.
The wrong form “one of the only” arises when a speaker or writer has more than one thought in mind at the same time, such as “only a few people here speak Spanish” and “she is one of the few here who speak Spanish.”
Speakers of English often make another mistake — unrelated to the one just mentioned — with phrases such as “one of the few.”
It can be exemplified by the sentence “She is one of the few people in our school who speaks Spanish” (and it also occurs with “one of the only”: “She is one of the few people in our school who speaks Spanish”).
The right form is “She [subject in the singular] is [hence verb in the singular] one of the few people [formally singular noun taking a plural verb] in our school who speak [hence verb in the plural] Spanish.”
That is, we have here a conflation of two sentences:
1. A few people [formally singular noun taking a plural verb] in our school speak [hence plural verb] Spanish.
2. She [singular subject] is [hence singular verb] one of the few people.
The fact that the word “people” is formally singular does not trigger the mistake, as we see from wrong sentences such as “He is one of the teachers who says that […].” Rather, it stems from a belief that the verb in the subordinate clause should agree in number with the subject of the sentence.
That mistake occurs in Hebrew, Spanish, and maybe other languages too.
August 20, 2013 at 6:44 am
goofy
David, a sentence like “She is one of the few people in our school who speaks Spanish” is not a mistake. This is how English writers have been using English for hundreds of years. If the writer is more concerned with “one”, then the verb is singular, and if the writer is more concerned with “people” then the verb is plural. It’s a matter of notional agreement. See Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, “one of those who” page 689.
August 20, 2013 at 7:08 am
David L. Gold
All prescriptive statements, mine included, are arbitrary. In deciding how I want to speak and write and how I respond to those seeking my editorial advice, I readily consider all prescriptive statements I can find, but none gets extra points just because so-and-so made it.
I am still of the opinion that “She is one of the few who […]” and similar sentences should have a plural verb in the subordinate clause.
August 20, 2013 at 9:44 am
David L. Gold
After thinking about the statement “If the writer is more concerned with ‘one’, then the verb is singular, and if the writer is more concerned with ‘people’ then the verb is plural,” I conclude, at least for the time being, that it is an example of psychologizing.
I doubt that people would, even subconsciously, be thinking about the question “Am I more concerned with ‘one’ or with ‘people’?” before finishing the sentence “She is one of the few people in our school who [….] Spanish” and that hearers or readers of such a sentence would infer, depending on whether the text had “speaks” or “speak,” that the speaker or writer intended to emphasize ‘one’ or ‘people’.
Rather, in my opinion, the fact that one of the preceding subjects is singular and the other one is plural fosters the likelihood, especially in unmonitored or unedited discourse, of a random selection of number in the second verb.
What does “more concerned with” mean here? Can each of the two variants of the sentence be put into a cotext or into a context such that the other variant would be inappropriate in that cotext or that context?
August 20, 2013 at 12:10 pm
goofy
I was paraphrasing MWDEU. The statement you call psychologizing is basically from Jesperson, quoted in MWDEU.
The fact is that both constructions (with a singular verb and a plural verb) are used by well-regarded writers who presumably know what they’re doing.
August 27, 2013 at 10:55 pm
Neal Goldfarb
Derek Schmidt’s example isn’t a fair one because he starts out talking about types (“the only kinds of writing utensils”) but then switches to talking about tokens of those types:
“But I have many of those pens, so if someone asked if they could borrow a pen, and I said, ‘No, that’s one of the only writing utensils on my desk!’ that would be a little disingenuous and if someone was standing at my desk and saw the number of writing utensils, they would be baffled and think me a fool.”
December 3, 2013 at 3:05 pm
mendel
Why didn’t you apply scalar implicature (or something like it) to your own reading of “one of the only”? Let me quote your March 31, 2009 post.
“‘The only things I liked about living in Ottawa’ is a noun phrase, identifying the set of things the speaker liked about living in Ottawa, noting that this set is the complete set, and implying that it’s an awfully small set. That’s what the quantifier only means, that’s what it’s meant for hundreds of years. One of modifies a noun phrase, selecting one member of that set. The two combined, as they are in (1), pick out a single member of the set of all things the speaker liked about living in Ottawa.”
The combination drops the meaning “complete” because it is useless: technically, the phrase picks out a single member of the *complete* set of all things the speaker liked about living in Ottawa. Clearly, it doesn’t matter whether the single member is picked from a complete or an incomplete set. It follows that this restriction (that the member be picked from a complete set), although true, should be dropped, leaving us with the “awfully small” meaning of only. If I mean “awfully small set”, shouldn’t I be using “few”?
The iffy feeling I get when I see “one of the only” misused is that here is someone who isn’t aware of the (to me) main meaning of “only” = “complete set”. They’re clearly speaking a different language.
[“a different language” .. than I do? .. from me? .. to me? .. as I do?]
February 7, 2017 at 4:04 pm
Doug
I know this thread is a few years old, but I just stumbled across it and wanted to add my two cents in case anyone is still paying attention.
The mistake here is thinking that the use of “only” has anything to do with the size of the set, when it’s really about the presence of the set itself. “One of the many” is just as legitimate as “one of the few” because both refer to a single set that contains multiple members, and whether that set contains few or many members is irrelevant to the use of “the only”. Someone talked about “only” historically being used as a plural term like “there are only two people”, but again, “two people” describes *a *single set* that contains two members, and is therefore a singular term in that context. “One of” clearly indicates that the object is a unique member out of that set, so when “the only” is followed by a plural then the object becomes a single member out of a set of manys. If it sounds like nonsense when I put it that way then that’s good, because that’s how “one of the many” sounds to me!
Please stop saying “one of the only”; it grates on my nerves almost as much as inappropriate mixing of pronouns (e.g. “him and me”)!
May 10, 2017 at 9:17 am
Peter Milner
In British English capitalising ‘The Few’ almost always indicates the Battle of Britain fighter pilots of 1940. Therefore in this context ‘one of The Few’ almost always indicates a heroic flyer.
October 8, 2021 at 10:07 am
Shirley777
“One of the only” is confusing. Many people will wonder, “Does that mean one of the few? Or does it mean the only one?” In my opinion that is reason enough to avoid using the construction.