By William Safire Sunday, June 24, 2007 Sometimes it takes a foundry to produce a word. In January, a horse named One Off won the San Marcos Stakes at Santa Anita in Los Angeles. "The whole basis of political debate has changed," Prime Minister Tony Blair said when making his triangulated "New Way" pitch in 2000, "and there's a one-off, heaven-sent opportunity to establish a new consensus." In the splendiferous arts pages of The New York Sun, the critic James Gardner hailed a blue landscape depicting a Greek town by Gregory Kondos as "a seemingly effortless one-off act of visual tact." "When an obscure Russian company comes to town for a one-off performance of a classical ballet," wrote Gia Kourlas of The New York Times, "you never know what to expect." In a more sinister vein, regarding the murder of a former KGB agent living in London, The Guardian wrote that "legislation passed by Russia to deal with one-off requests by European countries prohibits the extradition of its citizens." (Expect a Kremlin stonewall.) Elizabeth Stone of Cincinnati writes that "the meaning of one-off eludes me, and my inquiries have been met with the assurance that it denotes something weird or unique." Weird, no; unique, yes. My fellow word maven, Barbara Wallraff at The Atlantic, says that one-off "is popular because we can't trust unique to convey 'one of a kind' anymore; 'one of a kind' is awkward and wordy; 'single' doesn't always have the right implications - that is, one-off meets a need. And it does it in a jaunty, Anglophile way that's to some people's taste." One-off started as a manufacturing term to denote "the only item of its kind." The newfangled heavy gizmo was produced as an experiment or by accident or by just fooling around creatively with molten metal. The Oxford English Dictionary has a 1934 citation from the British Foundrymen's publication: "A splendid one-off pattern can be swept up in a very little time." A 2003 citation from The Washington Post, however, strikes me as off the mark: "Iraq is obviously pivotal to American national security. But it is a one-off, an unusual case that is unlikely to recur." I dispute that Post definition. One-off does not mean merely "unusual." The one is off by itself, standing alone, pristine in its singularity. The compound adjective and noun means, in my mind, "without precedent, easily copied but impossible to perfectly reproduce or clone." Wallraff is right about the degeneration of unique. Those of us still on the burning deck of good usage believe that unique - the paradigm of absolute solitude - can never be modified with an insipid very, quite, rather, almost or practically. But now that the pushovers of permissiveness have sliced and diced the solitary meaning of unique with wimpy adverbs, a fresh expression of splendid singularity is welcome. Try this, from The Daily Telegraph in England, about the chap who runs the Glastonbury Festival: "He's a fantastic eccentric, really, a one-off." That gets across the point that there is nobody the least bit like him in all of Glastonbury. It is not to be confused with onetime, a temporal term that more often means "former" than "only once." What about one-shot? That comes from golf: "The one-shot hole," reported The Westminster Gazette in 1907, "which can just, and only just, be reached from the tee by a fine driver." But by its centennial this year, the term picked up a pejorative connotation, as in "that's just a one-shot," a lucky break by some duffer or amateur hedge-fund investor unlikely to be repeated. That leaves one-off as the putative new unique. Semantically, however, our borrowing from Britain hasn't settled its meaning yet. We see usages like this from Randy Falco, the new AOL chief executive, earnestly professing his long-term commitment: "I'm very loyal. I'm not in here for a short ride. I'm not a one-off guy." (Maybe that sense is associated with "one-night stand.") But wait: If one-off still has a variety of meanings, why abandon the ramparts on unique? For a century, usagists have been holding this line: unique is unique, an absolute adjective like pregnant, no degrees awarded, not to be attacked with modifiers. What to call the last person in the world insisting on the absolute virginity of unique? That lone lexie of the future, desperately trying to marshal resistance to the Visigoths of vocabulary, will be hooted at as a one-off. safireonlanguage@nytimes.com