More longer friend see that sky?

The text was complete. Finished. Ready. 100%. All that remained was one single, small matter of semantics which had to be ironed out. To be more specific, whether a certain word should be written in the singular or the plural

At first, he thought it would only be a matter of grammar. Some words are simply inexplicably plural, and this might just be one of those words. However, looking closer at it, he realized that things were about to become slightly more tangled than that

If he were to go with the singular form, he would write himself into a very specific tradition, bringing with it a whole host of assumptions, connotations and non-obvious baggage that may or may not be appropriate to the rest of the argument. If he were to go with the plural form, however, those who ascribe to the aforementioned tradition would likely find the text insulting, or at the very least ignorant to an unflattering degree. Which in and of itself would be neither here nor there, except that these people had a non-trivial influence on the matter of funding

This was, he concluded, indeed one of those words