Hunting the Tells That Vanish When Named

My Weird Prompts · Sep 21, 2026 · 22m

Daniel noticed "failure mode" showing up everywhere in our own scripts, and wondered what other verbal tics are hiding in a corpus of thousands of episodes. There's no off-the-shelf LLM tick detector — but there is a whole discipline built for exactly this. This episode walks through corpus linguistics tooling: quanteda's keyness function, corpkit's subcorpus slicing, pycorpdiff's changepoint detection, and the surprisingly large body of research on which words AI actually overuses. The answer isn't "delve." It's "overall," "including," and "factors" — the emptiest words in the language…