Saturday, December 12, 2009

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In praise of kudos

That’s koo-dos, with an unvoiced “s”, not the voiced koo-doz, which sounds like a plural.

It’s not a plural, in fact. “Kudos” comes from Greek, a singular noun meaning “praise”. Just as we’d say “much praise”, not “many praise” (nor even “many praises”), we should say “much kudos”, not “many”. “The kudos she received for her work was [not were] well deserved.

In particular, never say “a kudo”; it makes no more sense than to take a couple called “Jones” and refer to one of them as “a Jone”. The cosmos doesn’t give us a “cosmo”. We can experience pathos, but there is no “patho”. Not everything ending in “s” is a plural.

Much kudos to those who get it right.

7 comments:

Sue VanHattum said...

I had no idea, and I'm glad to learn it. Thanks.

However, I think this one is too far gone. I just looked at dictionary.com, and as I suspected, they agree with your history, but allow for kudo as a "back formation".

Barry Leiba said...

Ah, many of the wordie things I go on about are too far gone. I think I'm the patron language-blogger of lost causes.

The Ridger, FCD said...

Do you bitch about pea and cherry, or is there a time limit for "too far gone"? (grin)

Barry Leiba said...

Of course, you meant your question to be silly, but for a semi-serious answer: I think there’s still got to be some educated usage in support of “the old way” in order to try to hold onto it. No one takes issue with “pea” or “cherry” any more, at least not seriously, nor have they for a very long time. There are others, apart from me, who today stick with the singular “kudos”.

And, truly, use of “kudos” as a plural bothers me less than “kudo” does. Most of the time, you can’t tell anyway; in typical usage, “Her boss gave her kudos for her work,” it can be construed as either singular or plural, and is explicitly neither. But “Give Sally a kudo,” looks barely literate to me. (In contrast, while I wouldn’t say “the hoi polloi,” myself, I accept it without remark from others. (I will, though, respond to its use to mean the upper class with, “I do not think that means what you think it means.”))

At least I haven’t heard it verbed yet. “Hey, Bob, kudo Sally for me, will ya?”

Michelle said...

So, what if you're giving kudos to more than one person, ie plural kudos (?) Would that be "kudoses" aka "Joneses" to use a relevant example? Or is it still "kudos", and if it is, then is it because the plural is the same word as the singular, or because the word already in itself includes the possibility of plurality? And did anything I just said make the slightest bit of sense?*?

Michelle said...

Forget I said all that, reading the post over, properly and not just skimming over, I realize that kudos is not so much a thing, as it is stuff.. ie, no need for pluralizing. I think...

Barry Leiba said...

Yes, exactly: it's collective, like "praise".