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

Mushrooms become source for eco-building By JESSICA M. PASKO, Associated Press Writer

Eben Bayer grew up on a farm in Vermont learning the intricacies of mushroom harvesting with his father. Now the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute graduate is using that experience to create an organic insulation made from mushrooms.

More at home on a pizza, mushrooms certainly aren't a typical building material, but Bayer thought they just might work when given the assignment two years to create a sustainable insulation.

Combining his agricultural knowledge with colleague Gavin McIntyre's interest in sustainable technology, the two created their patented "Greensulate" formula, an organic, fire-retardant board made of water, flour, oyster mushroom spores and perlite, a mineral blend found in potting soil. They're hoping the invention will soon be part of the growing market for eco-friendly products.

Bringing the insulation to market is still at least a year away though, said McIntyre, and will require much more research and work, not to mention more sophisticated equipment and a better work space.

"We've been growing the material under our beds," said McIntyre, adding that they've applied for a grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance.

The two young developers — Bayer is 21, McIntyre 22 — graduated in May from RPI with dual majors in mechanical engineering and product design and innovation.

"I think it has a lot of potential, and it could make a big difference in people's lives," said RPI Professor Burt Swersy, whose Inventor's Studio course inspired the product's creation. "It's sustainable, and enviro-friendly, it's not based on petrochemicals and doesn't require much energy or cost to make it."

The two say recent tests at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have shown it to be competitive with most insulation brands on the market. A 1-inch-thick sample of the perlite-mushroom composite had a 2.9 R-value, the measure of a substance's ability to resist heat flow. Commercially produced fiberglass insulation typically has an R-value between 2.7 and 3.7 per inch of thickness, according to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

With a rapidly increasing global population, a limited supply of natural resources, and rising energy prices, eco-friendly housing products are selling fast. Numerous companies have carved out their niche selling "green" building supplies such as recycled fiber board and plant-based paints. The Environmental Home Center in Seattle sells an insulation made from denim scraps and another made from 100 percent recycled paper among their many green building products.

After looking through about 800 patents, though, Bayer and McIntyre realized they'd hit upon a relatively original idea. Unlike many green building products, Greensulate isn't made from pre-existing materials. It requires little energy or expense to produce because it's grown from organic material.

Here's how it works: A mixture of water, mineral particles, starch and hydrogen peroxide are poured into 7-by-7-inch molds and then injected with living mushroom cells. The hydrogen peroxide is used to prevent the growth of other specimens within the material.

Placed in a dark environment, the cells start to grow, digesting the starch as food and sprouting thousands of root-like cellular strands. A week to two weeks later, a 1-inch-thick panel of insulation is fully grown. It's then dried to prevent fungal growth, making it unlikely to trigger mold and fungus allergies, according to Bayer. The finished product resembles a giant cracker in texture.

"It really allows for a myriad of uses," said McIntyre. He said they've envisioned modifying the product to make structural panels that could be grown and assembled onsite to produce sustainable homes.

"Green building materials should be evaluated on the idea of cradle to cradle," said Evelyne Michaut of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In the cradle-to-cradle industrial model, goods should either be fully biodegradable or reusable, limiting waste and pollution, according to Michaut, a sustainable city advocate from Santa Monica, Calif.

"That's the ultimate environmental reference," she said, adding that it seems like Greensulate is on its way to fulfilling that criteria.

For Bayer and McIntyre, their next step will be creating larger pieces of Greensulate to use in building a wall. From there, they'll perform further testing to see how the product stands up to various elements, including saturation and humidity. McIntyre said they have one two-year-old sample that's been exposed to the elements and shown no sign of degradation.

As part of their development plan, they're entering a new business incubation program at RPI to get their company, Ecovative Design, off the ground. Eventually, they hope to land a partnership with another company.

"Our biggest challenge is that while we have this technology, we still have a lot of research to do," said Bayer. "The key is to really make sure we have a product that is mature and robust before we bring it to the market."

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On the Net:

RPI: http://www.rpi.edu

Oak Ridge National Laboratory: http://www.ornl.gov/

National Institute of Standards and Technology: http://www.nist.gov/