Q. I just came across a sentence that said something like “The platypus looks like a cross among a duck, a weasel, and a rabbit.” Among sounds correct if used with talking, distributing, and so on with more than two entities, but cross isn’t the same sense and sounds incorrect because there’s no communication, distribution, or whatever. Is this after all correct, or should it be rewritten as “a combination of”?
A. “A combination of” reads better than “a cross among,” but you could also write “a cross between a duck, a weasel, and a rabbit,” since it’s merely a myth that between must be used for only two items.