Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx skills add human-avatar/skills-for-humanity --skill s4h-linguistics-connotationgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/human-avatar/skills-for-humanityWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-linguistics-connotation)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-linguistics-connotation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-linguistics-connotation/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-linguistics-connotation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-linguistics-connotation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00080 | $0.01875 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00040 | $0.00937 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00016 | $0.00375 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00187 |
Grade A, and why
s4h-linguistics-connotation scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 128 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Linguistics: Connotation
Words do not just mean. They do.
The gap between denotation (what a word technically refers to) and connotation (what it evokes, who uses it, what it signals about you) is where most communication misfires originate. "Investment" and "expenditure" can describe the same financial transaction, yet one word positions the speaker as forward-looking and the other as cost-focused. "Activist" and "advocate" describe someone who takes public action on a cause; one has acquired associations with disruption and radicalism that the other has not. "Undocumented" and "illegal" describe the same immigration status; their connotative freight determines what policy conclusions feel available.
Steven Pinker's work on the "euphemism treadmill" demonstrates that this is not a solved problem: even carefully chosen neutral terms acquire negative connotations over time as long as the underlying referent carries stigma. The solution is not finding the "right" neutral word but understanding what your current word choices are doing and making deliberate choices about what to activate.
This skill audits word choices for their connotative freight — the emotional register, political associations, in-group signaling, and audience-specific valence of key terms — and finds better alternatives when the current choices are undermining the message.
Your Process
Step 1: Identify Key Terms Read the text, message, or word list provided. Identify the terms with the highest connotative significance — the words doing the most work beyond their literal meaning. These are usually:
- Evaluative terms (words that carry implicit judgment: "streamlined", "bloated", "robust")
- Category terms (how you classify people, actions, or situations: "users" vs. "customers" vs. "patients")
- Action terms (verbs that carry agency and valence: "decided" vs. "was forced to", "invested" vs. "spent")
- Metaphors (which frame a situation in terms of another: "war on X", "X ecosystem", "pipeline")
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 9d ago First seen · 128 lines · 80 tokens per session scan A 65dd330bad9d
s4h-linguistics-connotation is a skill published in the GitHub repository human-avatar/skills-for-humanity (223 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 80 tokens to every session and 1,875 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.
Other skills, from other repositories
decision-making-under-pressure
Provides practical habits for making better decisions faster -- reframing problems before solving them, knowing when to stop deliberating, balancing intuition with analysis, resisting 'just this once' compromises, and breaking overthinking cycles. Use when facing a high-stakes choice with incomplete data, sensing that…
flow-state
Optimizes individual and team productivity using Csikszentmihalyi's flow state framework, covering the conditions for flow (clear goals, immediate feedback, challenge-skill balance), the four-stage flow cycle, and organizational flow design. Use when auditing personal or team focus time, diagnosing productivity loss…
stoic-right-action
Applies Stoic ethics of right action to entrepreneurial decision-making, covering the four cardinal virtues (courage, justice, temperance, wisdom), ethical leadership under pressure, and the discipline of choosing the harder right over the easier wrong. Use when facing ethical dilemmas in business, building a…
bakeoff
Turn one decision into a judged tournament of solutions, then pick the best. Given a problem, design choice, or a suggestion you want cross-verified, it generates diverse candidate solutions, auto-derives the evaluation dimensions for THAT problem (so you don't have to know what to score on), judges every candidate…
balanced-scorecard
Translate strategy into metrics across Financial, Customer, Internal Process, and Learning & Growth perspectives.
customer-journey-map
Visualize every touchpoint a customer has with a product or service — stages, actions, emotions, pain points, opportunities.