Peter Jones

Kudos

The mistake made by the Taxpayers Alliance may one day be standard English

issue 10 December 2016

What is a ‘kudo’? According to the Taxpayers’ Alliance, it is a mark of honour, many of which should be given to the Commons’ British Infrastructure Group, for demanding the scrapping of Air Passenger Duty.

The Alliance clearly thinks that ‘kudo’ is the singular of our ‘kudos’. It is not. Kudos is singular already: it has been brought into English from ancient Greek κυδος (‘glory, honour’). But is it ‘wrong’?

‘Kudo’ is what is known as a back formation, generated by removing a word’s prefixes or suffixes to create a brand new one. Such back formations are rampant in English. Take the Latin pisum, ‘pea’. The Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons, the source of our English, who came to these isles after the Romans left in the 5th century ad, had been trading with the Romans for many years, and in the process absorbed much of their vocabulary.

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