prose_checks: stop flagging "rather than" / "would rather" as weasel words - #82
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"rather" hedges only as an intensifier ("rather large"). As a bare term it
also matched the comparison "rather than" and the preference "would/I'd
rather": 16 of 22 weasel-word hits in the 2026-09-20..23 blog-review Ralph
runs were those false positives (8 posts: 22 -> 5 hits). The pattern now uses
a negative lookahead for "than" and lookbehinds for would/I'd. Intensifier
use is still flagged. Adds tests/test_prose_checks_weasel.py (corpus cases).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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The weasel-word list had a bare
rather, so it flagged the comparison "rather than" and the preference "would / I'd rather". Neither is a hedge.ratherhedges only as an intensifier, as in "rather large".Evidence: in the 2026-09-20..23 blog-review Ralph runs, 16 of 22 weasel-word hits were these false positives. On the 8 affected posts, hits drop from 22 to 5:
The 5 hits that remain are real or borderline hedges ("In some cases", "tend to" ×2, "could be" ×2).
Change:
rather→(?<!would\s)(?<!'d\s)(?<!’d\s)rather(?!\s+than\b). Every other term is unchanged.Tests: new
tests/test_prose_checks_weasel.pyuses corpus cases for "rather than", "would/I'd rather" (straight and curly apostrophes) and a line-wrapped "rather\nthan". It also asserts that intensifier "rather", "in some cases", "tend to" and "could be" are still flagged.python3 -m unittest discover tests: 42 tests OK.🤖 Generated with Claude Code