professional-language-audit

Professional Language Audit

Wrong skill? AI slop detection → detecting-ai-slop. AI slop rewriting → eliminating-ai-slop. General writing standards → writing-skills.

Last Updated: 2026-03-11 Incident: Profanity found in documentation during audit. AI slop skills didn't catch it.

When to Use

• Before publishing any user-facing text
• Pre-commit gate step 4 (after code review)
• When content includes casual or potentially inappropriate language

Gate Behavior

This skill scans content for profanity and unprofessional language BEFORE it reaches user-facing documentation. It operates as a HARD GATE — content with profanity cannot be published.

This skill fires AUTOMATICALLY before:

• Wiki updates (any wiki platform)
• Git commits of user-facing docs (README.md, skill.md, *.md in skills/)

When to Invoke Manually

• "Check this document for profanity"
• "Scan for unprofessional language"
• "Run language audit on README"
• Before publishing any user-facing content

HARD GATE Behavior

Gate Status: 🚫 BLOCKED

If profanity is detected, the operation is BLOCKED:

⛔ PROFESSIONAL LANGUAGE AUDIT FAILED

Gate Status: 🚫 BLOCKED — Cannot publish
Violations Found: 3

| Line | Text | Category | Suggestion |
|------|------|----------|------------|
| 47 | "[crude] experience" | profanity | "frustrating experience" |
| 112 | "[expletive] broken" | profanity | "completely broken" |
| 156 | "this is [expletive]" | profanity | "this is unacceptable" |

ACTION REQUIRED:
1. Replace all flagged terms
2. Re-run audit: "check for profanity"
3. Only then proceed with publish/commit

Gate Status: ✅ PASS

If no profanity is detected:

✅ PROFESSIONAL LANGUAGE AUDIT PASSED

Gate Status: ✅ PASS — Ready to publish
Scanned: 1,247 words across 3 files
Profanity matches: 0

Proceed with wiki update/commit.

Detection Patterns

Pattern Loading

Patterns are loaded from .profanity-patterns.txt (in scripts/ or repo root).

Pattern structure: \b(pattern1|pattern2|pattern3|...)\b

Matching is:

• Case-insensitive
• Word-boundary constrained (won't match "class" when looking for a substring)

Categories

Category	Severity	Action
Explicit/sexual terms	HIGH	BLOCK
Scatological terms	HIGH	BLOCK
Religious profanity	HIGH	BLOCK
Body vulgarities	HIGH	BLOCK
Gendered slurs	HIGH	BLOCK
Internet shorthand	MEDIUM	BLOCK
Crude expressions	LOW	FLAG for review

FLAG vs BLOCK:

• BLOCK = Cannot proceed until fixed
• FLAG = Warning, context determines appropriateness (e.g., "dumb terminal" is technical)

Integration Points

Gate 4 in the commit-gates chain: pre-commit-gate → enforce-style-guide → progressive-code-review-gate → this → public-repo-ip-audit → commit.

Preferred: use-skill unified-commit-gate loads all 5 gates in one load. Use this skill directly only for deep-dive when the language gate fails.

Pre-wiki: Run profanity regex before publishing. BLOCK on match. Pre-commit: Scan staged .md files:

git diff --cached --name-only | grep -E '\.(md)$'
node scripts/slop-dictionary.js scan-profanity FILE.md

Replacement Suggestions

Pattern Type	Professional Alternative
[crude]-[negative]	unrewarding, frustrating, problematic
[expletive] broken	completely broken, non-functional
this is [expletive]	this is unacceptable, this doesn't work
[profane] difficult	extremely difficult, challenging
[crude] code	poor quality code, problematic code
what the [expletive]	what happened, unexpectedly
[angry expletive]	frustrated, upset

Audit Commands

Single file:

node scripts/slop-dictionary.js scan-profanity FILE.md

Seed profanity patterns to dictionary:

node scripts/slop-dictionary.js seed-profanity

List profanity patterns:

node scripts/slop-dictionary.js list profanity

Companion Skills

• detecting-ai-slop: Profanity as Category 9 (HARD BLOCK)
• pre-commit-gate: Integrates this skill into commit workflow
• enforce-style-guide: Style checking (runs before language audit)
• public-repo-ip-audit: IP audit (runs after language audit)

Failure Modes

• Over-flagging technical terms: Words like "kill," "abort," "master" in engineering contexts are often appropriate
• Missing context-dependent profanity: Profanity in quoted user feedback or log output may be intentional — flag but don't auto-remove
• Ignoring non-English content: Profanity in other languages in multilingual codebases