buzzword

A deny rule by default: it refuses a word chosen to sound significant rather than to say what is so ("delve", "tapestry").

What it catches

A word chosen to sound significant rather than to say what is so ("delve", "tapestry").

Dimension

economy: words that carry nothing. A finding is counted on the dimension of its rule, the cost it names to the reader.

Why

The list holds words with no plain sense in technical text. Zero hits over the docs pages, changelog fragments and merged pull requests. Measured 2026-10-10 before a fix: 85.7% precision on its cases (6 of 7), firing on 0.1% of AIDev pull requests and 1 magus commit body; of 40 pull request firings read, 18 were wrong: "on the same page" as a page (7), "deep dive" naming a document (5), "vibrant" as a color (4), "underscores" as the character. Those now count only in their buzzword sense: after a person, before into or ending the phrase, before an abstract noun, and as a verb. After: 100% on its cases; firing rates measured at merge.

Default decision

The code is PRF4006. The decision depends on the kind of text judged:

Changing it

A decisions table sets this rule to deny, advise or off, for everything judged or for the files a glob matches. Proofread reads the table from the file its -decisions flag names:

{
  "rules": {"buzzword": "advise"},
  "paths": {"blog/**": {"buzzword": "off"}}
}

rules applies to every file. A glob in paths applies to the files it matches, and the last match wins. A rule set to off never reports.

Seeing it

A finding names the rule, its code and the decision that applies, and links here:

{"rule": "buzzword", "code": "PRF4006", "decision": "deny", "url": "https://eli.gladman.cc/magus/reference/proofread/buzzword/"}

proofread rules prints this entry with every other rule's.

See also

• All proofread rules - every rule, grouped by what it checks
• Writing rules - how the rules apply to this repository's pages and pull requests
• The findings contract - the fields every finding carries