Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

I finally got around to reading Chapter 93 of "Mayhem in a Pill." The name of the chapter is "Accept These Kudos." The chapter name gave me pause. Something didn't seem right. I finally remembered: A long time ago in a land far, far away, Mrs Higginbotham taught me sixth-grade English. In that class, we were taught that kudos is a synonym for "praise" and is not a plural word. Admittedly, my sixth-grade class was decades ago and things could have changed since then. or, alternatively, Mrs Higginbotham could have been wrong. Is there a consensus on whether kudos is plural?

Here's what Merriam Webster has to say. As to whether or not your sixth grade teacher was wrong, that may depend on how old you are.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kudos

Kudos looks plural, but it didn't begin that way. Kudos is one of a number of Greek-derived English nouns ending in -os; as with pathos there are no subdivisions in the idea of the original kudos, and the term is used with some, not a. What separates kudos from pathos, however, is that it is often interpreted as plural, with its -s getting clipped off and kudo being applied as a singular noun, as in "a kudo to anyone who remembers that kudos is not a plural noun." Kudos the mass noun was adopted as British university slang in the early 1800s with its still-current pronunciation of KOO-dahss, but by the 1920s kudo was being used as a count noun, with kudos, pronounced as KOO-dohz, as its plural. You will see the newer, singular version of the word at its own entry.

Not to be confused with the African antelope.