Latinate quantity flourish
- Id
- latinate-quantity-flourish
- Status
- Active
- Severity
- low
- Detection
- deterministic
- Evidence grade
- community-observed
- Languages
- en
- Added
- 2026-08-15
- Updated
- 2026-08-17
Currently signals low-effort writing.
What it is
An ornate quantity noun where a number or the word many would carry the same information. A myriad of options and a plethora of features tell the reader that the count is large and withhold the count. The pattern matches the fixed determiner phrases only. It leaves the bare noun alone, and it leaves an array of alone on purpose, because an array is a literal object in engineering and photography and the phrase there is a description rather than a flourish.
Why it reads as machine-made
The construction fills the slot where a number belongs. It reads as effort without being effort, which is the recurring shape of low-effort prose: the sentence performs care and carries no fact.
Specimens
The dashboard surfaces a myriad of signals from a wide range of connected sources. Some of them matter more than others, and which ones matter comes down to what you are trying to learn. Teams that look at it regularly build a feel for their own numbers that no single metric gives them. That feel is the part worth having.
The dashboard reads five things: posting cadence, reply latency, follower change, link clicks, and the share of posts that got no reply at all. The last one is the only one that ever changed what we did.
The repair names the count and then says which item mattered.
How it is detected
- Pattern
- \b(?:a\s+myriad\s+of|myriad\s+of|a\s+plethora\s+of|a\s+wide\s+(?:range|array|variety)\s+of)\b
- Flags
- gi
- Scope
- sentence
Who writes this way legitimately
Literary and humanities registers use these words without irony, and myriad has been ordinary English since the sixteenth century in both its adjectival and its nominal form. Writers taught to vary their diction reach for them because varying diction is what they were told to do, and that instruction falls hardest on second-language writers whose graders reward it. Catalogue copy and academic survey articles legitimately need a quantity word before a list the writer is about to give in full. A reviewer should check whether the count appears anywhere nearby: a plethora followed by seven named items is a stylistic choice, and a plethora followed by nothing is a missing number.
Model attribution
Undocumented at family level. The evidence here is practitioner list convergence, not measurement, and the entry should not be read as saying more.
Status history
| Date | Status | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-15 | Active | Named by three independent community lists including one whose own purpose is inverted, which is recorded on the source. No published measurement exists for this family, so the grade stays community-observed and the severity stays low. |
Sources
- 01vale-ai-tells, 111 machine-checkable rulescommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
- 02is-this-ai-slop word and phrase listcommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
- 03keskinonur gist, words and phrases to avoid for ChatGPTcommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
Inverted source. Its own purpose runs counter to this index. It is cited for what it records about model output, and never as sole support for an entry.
CC BY 4.0 / The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells