lexicon.weasel-words

What it flags

Vague qualifiers that weaken a statement. A weasel word adds an invisible cognitive load: the reader has to decide whether the claim matters, is true, or measurable. References: Wikipedia style guide (Avoid weasel words), Strunk & White, FALC.

At a glance

Detection

Word-boundary match against a per-language list. Case-insensitive. One diagnostic per occurrence.

• Inline code spans. A hit inside `…` is skipped. Wrap a weasel term in backticks when you are discussing the word itself.
• Directional pairings. rather than (EN) and plutôt que (FR) are conjunctions meaning “instead of” — not hedges — and are skipped.

Parameters

Default lists (v0.1)

• 🇫🇷 quelques, certains, parfois, plutôt, assez, globalement, généralement, souvent, en général, la plupart, il semble que, il semblerait que, on pourrait dire que, on dit souvent, beaucoup de, peu de, presque, quasiment, environ, à peu près
• 🇬🇧 some, many, often, just, simply, clearly, obviously, seemingly, arguably, basically, essentially, virtually, various, numerous, sort of, kind of, a bit, rather, quite, fairly, relatively, mostly, generally

Known false positives

Two patterns still fire in v0.2: straight-quoted terms ("many X" without backticks) and "many X" where X is a concrete noun. Both are queued under F23 on the roadmap. Wrap the quoted term in backticks, or use an inline disable comment, to opt out.

Suppression

Use <!-- lucid-lint disable-next-line lexicon.weasel-words --> when the weasel is intentional (quotation, legitimate subset reference, meta-discussion). See Suppressing diagnostics.

References

• Strunk & White (1999)
• CAN-ASC-3.1:2025

See References for the full bibliography.