Regarding Widows, Widowers, and What If?

The word 'widow' is well-attested throughout the Indo-European family, recognizably cognate to the English. Note the following:

English	widow
Latin	vidua
Russian	вдова (vdova)
Sanskrit	विधवा (vidhava)
Persian	بیوه (viveh)

The Proto-Indo-European antecedent can likely be reconstructed as being close to the pronunciation of the word in Classical Latin: *widuwa.

It should be noted that the existence of the word in PIE simultaneously proves the existence of marriage in Proto-Indo-European culture. 

I assume that the masculine equivalent, widower, is simply the feminine word, with the Old English word for man 'wer' (cognate to Latin vir [man]) tacked on. The root also explains the word werewolf.

Robin Tolmach Lakoff, professor of Linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley, made an interesting observation about the words widow and widower. She notes that perfectly grammatical is the sentence:

Mary is John's widow.

But native speakers of English do not consider the following sentence possible:

*John is Mary's widower.

(Language and Women's Place: [Oxford University Press: 1975, p. 63])

It was, therefore, with some surprise that I spotted the following headline in an online article last evening:

It still does not sound like good English to me, even as I see it there. But a further online study of the matter revealed that this was not, in fact, the first time Dr. Lakoff's "rule" had been, as it were, skirted. 

Back in 2008, the following had already appeared in the New York Times:

So what's going on here? It still sounds weird to me as a native speaker of English. I suppose it is possible that the framers of these headlines are aware of Dr. Lakoff's work and have intentionally "violated" the rule in the interest of equality.

What I hope is true, however, is that, even though on my 53-year-old native speaker's ears this sounds awkwardly formed, that the younger generation simply does not hear it the same way. And perhaps even by virtue of this little somewhat obscure but linguistically fascinating (at least to me) point, the world is becoming a better place.