Giving someone a kudo is not bad English—bad Greek, maybe, but not bad English.
If I were to—for whatever bizarre reason—want to praise a pea, I could give a kudo to a pea.
52 Interestingly, the first recorded use of minutia in English (in 1782) refers to “some little minutias”—prophetic considering I didn’t write this book of minutias until nearly a quarter millennium later.
The screaming would come immediately: “Illiterate!,” the persnickitors will shout at me. “Kudos might mean ‘congratulations,’ but it is a singular word. You don’t create the singular by removing the S from kudos!”
All right, then. If I am to play by that particular rule, I will apply Xtreme Etymological Stasis and praise a pea by giving kudos to a pease. The screaming would be different this time: “What the hell is a pease?”
So let me counter the screaming: If converting kudos to the singular by dropping the S is such a linguistic sin, why have we allowed it with pease (in various forms back to about A.D. 800), the original singular form of pea, an S-less word that didn’t show up until around the early 1600s? (Pease was also a plural form, just as moose is both singular and plural.)
So here’s the scorecard, according to some:
Kudo instead of kudos: substandard English (and spoken substandardly since by the mid-i920s).
Pea instead of pease: standard English.
Cherry instead of cherise: standard English. (At least with cherry we created it wrong in the first place. Cherise is Old Northern French borrowed into English by 1300. Again, we thought that dropping an S would give us a singular. Good thing we didn’t apply that reasoning to a couple of the words used above: moo wouldn t make a particularly good singular for moose , and rai wouldn’t be an efficient synonym for one instance of raise.)
So, kudos to the careful writers who still use pease, and a kudo to those who eat all their peas and believe that this language is flexible enough, permissive enough, to allow us to use kudo.
750
Bill Brohaugh
A side note: the creation of kudo on the model of pea demonstrates—ironically—that everything old is news again, given the fact that a new was a singular instance of something new, but now we use that noun only in its plural— news —which we regard as singular. And for that we can give a prai.