"credulity" is a correct and usable word in written English.
It means "the tendency to be too willing to believe things". For example, "The teacher was disappointed with the students' credulity, as they had been too eager to believe what they had been told."
But this does not explain where the nucleus and the endoplasmic reticulum came from, and the suggestion that these, too, are somehow remnants of captured prokaryotes stretches credulity, as they resemble no modern free-living creature.
After all, is that not democracy in action?In this section Letters Letters ReprintsGARETH WILLIAMSDarmstadt, GermanySIR You say that "it stretches credulity to claim that...the prime minister is motivated by finer feelings for the fox".
It stretches credulity to argue that all this money has resulted in a more porous border.
Some of the annoyances can be understood, even if only at a stretch of the credulity.
It stretches credulity to claim, as Joseph Mendelson of America's Center for Food Safety does, that cloning animals for food will prove a "gateway technology" that will inexorably push society down a slippery slope to cloning humans.
One Ponzi, at the Baptist Foundation of Arizona, used 120 shell firms to extract $590m from members.There is only so much governments can do to protect people from their own credulity.
Mr Hollande, a strong runner for the Socialist presidential nomination, replied that he had "no knowledge" of the gravity of the charges.Yet it stretches credulity for the party to say that it had no inkling.
If it weren't for the monumental credulity of America's spy-loving public, the NSA might find itself in a bit of bind.
It is also because the unionists' relentlessly gloomy predictions for an independent Scotland are starting to strain credulity.
As Ms Romer writes, this strains credulity:The deepest and most destructive uncertainty we face centers on the overall health of the economy and its prospects for growth... Some forecasters say that consumer spending is on the rebound and that housing construction will bounce back as the normal demographic determinants of housing demand reassert themselves.
Not so, the deputy minister of the economy told a Buenos Aires newspaper this month: growth would be at least that high and might even hit 8%.At that point private-sector economists reached for their remaining supply of credulity and found, unsurprisingly, that it had run out.
