Magic adverbs
- Id
- magic-adverbs
- 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
One adverb carries the entire claim. tropes.fyi names the family after its most common member. The sentence asserts that a large change happened without anyone noticing, which conveniently removes the obligation to say who noticed it, when, or how it was measured. The repair is never a smaller adverb. It is a date and a name.
Why it reads as machine-made
An unwitnessed change cannot be checked. The adverb supplies the drama and deletes the evidence in the same word, which makes it the cheapest available way to sound like reporting. Feature ledes use the move deliberately and then settle the bill in the next paragraph with a scene, a source and a time. The low-effort version never settles it. A separate semantic entry covers the claim-level version of this problem, where the inflation lives in the sentence rather than in one word; this rule stays on the adverb.
Specimens
A handful of small studios are quietly reshaping how software gets sold. The shift has been under way for some time and nobody has quite noticed, which is more or less how shifts of this kind work.
Three studios we buy from moved to usage pricing between January and April. Two of them told us in the same week, after a customer asked why the invoice had changed.
Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen.
This shift is subtly transforming the way distributed teams work together.
Our standup moved to a written thread in February. Attendance stopped being a question, and the two people in other time zones now answer first.
How it is detected
- Pattern
- \b(?:quietly|silently|subtly|invisibly|steadily|slowly)\s+(?:reshap|transform|redefin|rewrit|upend|disrupt|reinvent|remak|revolutionis|revolutioniz)(?:e|es|ed|ing)\b
- Flags
- gi
- Scope
- sentence
Who writes this way legitimately
Feature ledes carry drama on purpose, and a reporter who has spent a month on a story has earned the word. Trade press, obituaries and profile writing all use the unwitnessed-change frame as a hook before naming the witness two sentences later. Fiction uses it without any obligation at all. The reviewer check is whether the sentence, or the one after it, names who noticed the change and when. If the piece can produce a person and a date, the adverb is doing ordinary work. If the change has no observer anywhere in the text, the adverb is the only evidence offered.
Model attribution
Unattributed. Neither source separates model families, and no vendor documentation names the adverb family.
Status history
| Date | Status | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-15 | Active | Opened as active. tropes.fyi names the adverb family directly and vale-ai-tells ships figurative and inevitability rules that catch neighbouring forms. Neither publishes a rate, so the grade stays community-observed and severity stays low. |
Sources
- 01tropes.fyi pattern directorycommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
- 02vale-ai-tells, 111 machine-checkable rulescommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
CC BY 4.0 / The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells