Tags

Somebody wrote that headline.

On Google News today, the above headline appears, attributed to the Atlantic magazine. The actual article has a different headline today, and I don’t know whether the above was the original headline, and somebody got to the Atlantic after Google News had reproduced its headline; or somebody connected with Google News came up with it—probably the former. But does anybody really think that “cosmos” is a plural noun? I’ve seen kudos treated as a plural noun several times, but that’s not a very common word, and one can imagine that lots of people have encountered it only in writing, and have no idea that it’s a singular Greek noun. But cosmos is a fairly common word. It’s been the title of at least two books and at least two TV series. There’s really no excuse.