American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana

> one of the only

That reminds me, I still have to put up the explanation at oneoftheonly.com for why this phrase doesn't make sense and is the new "could care less".

I would like a non-native speaker to weigh in, but I gloss it as "there are ONLY a few and this is ONE OF them" and have never found that confusing or contradictory.

That's exactly the difference: "one of the few" necessarily implies scarcity, whereas you could say e.g. "one of the only grains of sand at the beach" while clearly there are many.

edit: this conversation is a waste of time. retracting my comment

It's not that I don't understand what they want to express and how they use the phrase. I'm arguing that it's a poor phrase for the job, when "one of the few" exactly and necessarily implies that, while "one of the few" doesn't necessarily.

In fact it's even more vacuous ("nothingburger") because sometimes it's not even clear which way the person means it; if I say "I'm one of the only people to do a handstand on a Thursday morning", do I imagine that I'm in a large group or a small one?

[Edit: this paragraph added to respond to post below saying I'm not going to win, which was edited out and I couldn't respond to for some reason.] I'm not trying to "win" any more than I would try to tell people that literally isn't a synonym for figuratively; I know that ship has sailed. That doesn't mean I'm not allowed to say it doesn't make sense, and I'm very aware that people get extremely angry about it for some reason, as if it's a personal affront. Not everyone has to buy into the cargo cult of descriptivism (particularly in the face of absurdity), differences of opinion are still allowed :)

Is your objection to the use of 'only' to refer to multiple things, or specifically the phrase "one of the only"? Would you consider "I am only five minutes late" to be valid?

(edit - for the record, this was in response to the first paragraph only, as the others were edited in afterwards)

My objection is in direct analogy to "could care less": it fails to rule out the very thing that is to be ruled out.

The grains of sand example should make it clear: it is not true that this grain is one of few at the beach, but it is true that it's one of the only. This makes it a poor expression for scarcity, and while obviously we know what was actually intended (as with "could care less"), that doesn't really make it any better.