First up, let me apologise for the outage. My Zope server seems to have been down for some of the time that I was absent in the last few days. I only noticed when I attempted to do an update today. And yes, this does mean I've returned from my little excursion interstate. But now, on with the show.

The jargon of the real estate business is "one of those things", if you know what I mean. Like marketing in a more general sense, the real estate business has routinely stretched the meaning of words to such an extent that they now are understood to convey a special meaning when used in the real estate context. For example, the phrase "spectacular view", when used in ordinary language, can be taken at face value — the view in question should be understood to be highly impressive. When the phrase is used by a real estate agent to describe a house, however, the most you can assume is that the house in question has at least one window you can see out of. Stand-up comedy stuff, I know, but it wouldn't be funny if there were no truth in it.

Whilst commuting on the bus today, a particular instance of real estate jargon caught my attention. A house with a prominent position (relative to the bus route, at least) had a large "for sale" sign out the front with a number of bullet points proclaiming the virtues of this particular property. The bullet point which most captured my attention was one that said "unique location". I'd have called it "prominent position", myself, but prominence as such isn't a real selling point for residential properties. Prominence suggests busy and noisy, neither of which are typical desiderata for a residential home. To make the property sound more desirable, the location is instead described as "unique".

Uniqueness, per se, is not a good thing: it could be good, bad, or irrelevant; but the simple fact that uniqueness is being used as a selling point is enough to make people suppose that the location is unique in a good way. You'd be quite justified in asking what, exactly, it is about the location that makes it unique. If I pressed the real estate agent on this matter, I expect that I would discover "unique" is being used as a synonym for "distinctive". Real-estate-speak distorting the language again.

On the other hand, there's a good computer science case to be made for the use of "unique" to describe the location. Given that there is only one instance of that particular location, it is by definition unique. Alas, exactly the same point could be made of any location, and my computer science instincts tell me that a selling point should be a point of differentiation, not an exercise in tautology.

I'm sorry, Mr Real Estate Agent, but not even Nutter Computer Science can save you this time.