Now that you've provided the complete context, I think it is safe to say two things. Whichever variant works best for the last sentence in isolation — and it is easy to imagine that all three do, depending on dialect and register —, since the construction is repeated in the other two sentences,...

The rule for using the article a versus an is exactly the same as the rule governing whether one pronounces the article the as /ðə/ or as /ði/. Both rules operate for the same reason: they make it easier to pronounce and understand an article as distinct from the NP following it. If that NP st...

Actually, it appears that no one says any of those, perhaps because concede does not work that way: On the other hand, if you swap admits in for concedes, now you get a more interesting picture: And here is the past-tense version of the same: I find especially curious that this only star...

The problem with using formulary for a collection of mathematical formulae is that a formulary already means a bunch of prescriptions, like your health insurance company’s formulary. Since this is a technical sense, it may be better to return to the original Latin form, which would be a formular...

I always use canonize myself, because it’s short to type and accords with canon law. You could also use normalize or standardize, both of which are preferable to the wholly asquerous regularize, a sad and overburdened word brought to you by the unregulated coiners. Probably beatify isn’t going ...

EDIT: You left out the related gloaming, now included below. All three of these terms — twilight, crepuscule, and gloaming — seem usable for either half-light period, although during some historical periods occasionally one or the other of the two ends of that was the more common. Old English ha...

If you really and truly want to make do with just a single word alone, you are going to have to make due with something like a chronic underestimater or underestimator, a misjudger or even a low-baller. So it seems that they are perpetually falling short of the mark in their subaccurate assessm...

While yodeling to myself quietly in our warehouse today, a pallet full of mugs came crashing down on my head, and gave me a concussion idea. First, it's very unlucky to go yodeling around on a skate board in a dark warehouse, and second, we could really use a short creative writing contest. Fort...

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