lexicon.redundant-intensifier
What it flags
Intensifiers — adverbs that try to upgrade the confidence of a statement without adding information. very important reduces to important, or better, to a quantified claim. plainlanguage.gov (Chapter 4) and the CDC Clear Communication Index flag intensifiers as a plain-language anti-pattern.
The rule is a deliberate sibling of lexicon.weasel-words: weasel words downgrade confidence (hedges, qualifiers); redundant intensifiers upgrade it. The two lists are disjoint by construction.
At a glance
| Category | lexicon |
| Default severity | warning |
| Default weight | 1 |
| Condition tags | general |
| Languages | EN · FR |
| Source | src/rules/redundant_intensifier.rs |
Detection
Per paragraph, lowercase the text and look for each intensifier phrase in the per-language list (en::INTENSIFIERS, fr::INTENSIFIERS) using the shared word-bounded search. Hits inside fenced or inline code spans are ignored. Documents whose language is Unknown are skipped rather than guessed, matching lexicon.weasel-words.
Parameters
| Key | Type | dev-doc | public | falc |
|---|---|---|---|---|
custom_intensifiers_en | list<string> | [] | [] | [] |
custom_intensifiers_fr | list<string> | [] | [] | [] |
disable | list<string> | [] | [] | [] |
custom_intensifiers_en / _fr add phrases to the defaults. disable removes phrases from them (exact lowercase match).
Known caveats
veryin the fixed phrasevery well(as acknowledgment) still triggers — plain-language guides flag it anyway, so the rule does not carve out an exception. Suppress via inline directive if the context genuinely calls for it.- Metalinguistic references (“the word ‘very’ is an intensifier”) trigger unless the target word is in backticks. Use inline code spans for such references.
Suppression
See also
References
See References for the full bibliography.