I'm not sure 'serendipity' has quite the connotations we want

A friend and regular reader of this blog emailed me a couple of hours ago about that last post to say that he'd looked up singulars and plurals for 'remains' in Fowler's Modern English Usage, and reports that:

Fowler wonderfully says ‘plural names of diseases as mumps measles, glanders [pardon? Glanders??] can be treated as singular or plural’. But then remains are not a disease but the aftermath so not a lot of help.

I had a vague memory from a Robertson Davies novel that glanders was a disease horses get, and a vague notion that people could catch it, so, pausing only to read more news about a possible swine flu epidemic and start a mental shopping list of long-life groceries in case I have to stay inside for a month, I googled glanders (thereby acquiring my first-ever exposure to the verb 'to weaponize') to discover that both of these things are true, and furthermore that it is fatal, and that the word for a disease transmissible from animals to humans is zoonotic.

Eewww.