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Adds speciesism language patterns covering two categories: 1. Violent animal idioms — phrases that normalize animal harm (e.g. "kill two birds with one stone", "skin a cat", "beat a dead horse") with clearer, equally expressive alternatives. 2. Technical metaphors with animal origins — terms where a precise technical alternative already exists and is widely understood (e.g. canary deployment → progressive rollout, monkey patch → runtime patch, duck typing → structural typing). These patterns mirror the rules merged into webpack's Vale config on Feb 25, 2026 (webpack/webpack.js.org#7880) and align with the speciesism.yml PR open on retextjs/retext-equality (#130), the upstream package that powers alex.
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Friendly ping @jdkato — this adds a Speciesism rule set to alex, following the same pattern as the existing Ableism, Racism, and Sexism rule sets. Would love your thoughts when you get a chance. |
Author
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Closing this PR — on reflection, this change may not be the right fit for this project. Thanks for your time! |
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Summary
This PR adds a
Speciesism.ymlrule file covering language patterns that reference animal harm or frame animals as objects/tools, in cases where clearer, equally expressive alternatives exist.Two categories:
Violent animal idioms — phrases that normalize cruelty toward animals, with professional alternatives:
kill two birds with one stone→accomplish two things at oncebeat/flog a dead horse→belabor the pointskin a cat→many ways to approach thisbring home the bacon→earn a livingsacred cow→untouchable topicscapegoat/scapegoating→fall guy / wrongly blamingTechnical terms with animal origins — where a precise technical alternative is already standard:
canary deployment/release→progressive rollout/incremental deploymentmonkey patch/patching→runtime patch/dynamic patchduck typing→structural typing/implicit typingdogfooding→self-testing/using your own productcattle vs pets→ephemeral vs persistentstack canary/canary value→sentinel value/guard valuePrecedent
This is becoming an emerging standard in developer tooling. webpack merged equivalent rules to their Vale linting config on Feb 25, 2026: webpack/webpack.js.org#7880. The same patterns are being added upstream in retextjs/retext-equality (which powers the JavaScript
alexpackage): retextjs/retext-equality#130.The academic grounding is solid — Hagendorff et al. (2023) "Speciesist bias in AI" (doi:10.1007/s43681-023-00380-w) documents how normalized animal language in technical writing reinforces broader speciesist attitudes.
Notes
ignorecase: trueis set — handlesKill Two Birds.../Canary Deploymentetc.extends: substitutionpattern used byRace.ymland others