Camillien Houde: what next?
Allison Hanes blights this piece on the new administration’s take on the Camillien-Houde with the bold opening lede “Camillien-Houde Way is one of Montreal’s most unique thoroughfares.”
-
Kate
Reply
Recent Posts
- Chinatown: sex workers will have to wait
- Projet outspent Ensemble in recent election
- Potholes: are workers pushed to work too fast?
- Big bureaucratic IT systems: impossible to get right?
- The housing crisis, a consequence of financialization
- Montreal General: top of decrepitude list
- Ensemble: 38 fines for leaving placards up
Recent Comments
- JP on Airport: Google Maps sending wrong instructions
- JP on Big bureaucratic IT systems: impossible to get right?
- Mozai on Big bureaucratic IT systems: impossible to get right?
- Mozai on Ensemble: 38 fines for leaving placards up
- vasi on The housing crisis, a consequence of financialization
- Kevin on The housing crisis, a consequence of financialization
- Kevin on Big bureaucratic IT systems: impossible to get right?
Pages
Other levels of gov’t
Sideblog projects
Enviro Montreal is a Bluesky feed that follows local environment news. Also available on Mastodon.
Archives
Pages rescued from montreal.com
Meta
Tim S. 12:07 on 2026-01-18 Permalink
But it is, though. Maybe the most unique?
dhomas 12:23 on 2026-01-18 Permalink
I don’t think “unique” is the bold qualifier here. Calling it a “thoroughfare” is.
Kate 12:27 on 2026-01-18 Permalink
Things are unique or they are not. You can’t have something which is more unique than something else, or something that stands out in a collection of other unique items. The word becomes meaningless.
You could write “Camillien-Houde is a unique case in Montreal, crossing as it does the city’s eponymous mountain.”
But then I’m not editing the Gazette…
Tim S. 12:30 on 2026-01-18 Permalink
I see Kate, good catch about unique. Most distinctive?
Kate 15:56 on 2026-01-18 Permalink
We don’t usually rate streets by their distinctiveness, so it’s not a useful ploy as an opening statement.
“C-H holds a unique status in Montreal, cutting across its eponymous mountain with a nod to its resident dead and its living environment.” Etc.
Unique is fine. It’s turning it into a relative value that’s bad writing.
GC 18:17 on 2026-01-18 Permalink
Yeah, that annoyed me, too. I didn’t think a journalist would write that. But, I heard one say “anyways” a couple of weeks ago…so I guess anything goes.
Ian 21:27 on 2026-01-18 Permalink
ANYwhoodle
CE 00:03 on 2026-01-19 Permalink
Is anyone editing the Gazette these days?
Hamza 00:36 on 2026-01-19 Permalink
I have become so hyper-conscious of what I post , and a lot of it is due to @Kate’s astute editorial eye
Joey 06:44 on 2026-01-19 Permalink
“Most unique” is one of those things that upsets my inner copy editor (aka my inner Kate). However! It may be linguistically incorrect, but the meaning is legit – lots of things make the city unique, some of them are streets, and Camillien-Houde stands out even among this group. Would it really be more effective to write “among Montreal’s unique thoroughfares, Camillien-Houde Way is perhaps the most distinctive”? If you removed “most” from the original sentence, it doesn’t really make sense: “Camillien-Houde Way is one of Montreal’s unique thoroughfares.” So: the syntax is bad but the idea of distinctions within the concept of ‘unique’ is IMO justifiable.
Anton 16:54 on 2026-01-19 Permalink
Isn’t every street unique, in that no two streets are exactly the same?
Kate 21:09 on 2026-01-19 Permalink
It needed Anton’s logical brain!
MarcG 08:38 on 2026-01-20 Permalink
The last definition of the word in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “very special or notable : unusual” and the examples include “comparatively unique”, “very unique”, “most unique”. Don’t shoot the messenger.
CE 09:52 on 2026-01-20 Permalink
Dictionaries are generally willing to change their definitions to reflect popular usage, even when the newer definitions are objectively wrong usages of the word (see “literally”). Copy editors, because they think so much about the meanings of words and want to create as little ambiguity as possible, tend to be very conservative. Nobody uses “decimate” to mean something has been reduced or killed by ten percent anymore but many copy editors shy away from the modern usage of the word (kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of) because they can’t help but believe that someone out there will think it means the historical meaning of the word (this is an extreme example btw).
GC 10:53 on 2026-01-20 Permalink
I was also thinking about “literally”, CE. You might hear someone in a bar say “Camillien-Houde is literally the only way to cross Montreal”. But many of us would scratch our heads if we saw that written in mainstream media.
MarcG 10:56 on 2026-01-20 Permalink
I guess it depends on what is considered new, one of their examples is from 1853 (Charlotte Brontë’s Villette). This etymology site says (without reference) ‘The erroneous sense of “remarkable, uncommon” is attested from mid-19c’.
MarcG 10:57 on 2026-01-20 Permalink
Forgot to add the link https://www.etymonline.com/word/unique