s4h-linguistics-semantic-drift

s4h-linguistics-semantic-drift is a skill for Claude Code from human-avatar/skills-for-humanity. It costs 100 tokens per session (2,078 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A language-analysis tool that tracks how the meaning of a word or concept changes across time or between groups. It covers definition drift, where a term gradually comes to mean something different.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to examine changing terminology, concept creep, politically disputed words, or language whose meaning has shifted.
Why use it?
It helps explain disagreements caused by people using the same word with different meanings and shows what those changes affect.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the skills-for-humanity plugin — 197 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it to examine changing terminology, concept creep, politically disputed words, or language whose meaning has shifted.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-linguistics-semantic-drift
Install

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.

Any agent
npx skills add human-avatar/skills-for-humanity --skill s4h-linguistics-semantic-drift
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skills-for-humanity, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 197 skills, 1 hook.

Wrote 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.

agentmods badge for s4h-linguistics-semantic-drift

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-linguistics-semantic-drift/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-linguistics-semantic-drift)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-linguistics-semantic-drift"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-linguistics-semantic-drift/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for s4h-linguistics-semantic-drift

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-linguistics-semantic-drift"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-linguistics-semantic-drift.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 100 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,078 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00100 $0.02078
Opus 5 $0.00050 $0.01039
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00416
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00208

Measured 9d ago against content hash 5d6b91e6c88e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

s4h-linguistics-semantic-drift 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.

skills/s4h-linguistics-semantic-drift/SKILL.md · 138 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 138 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Linguistics: Semantic Drift

Words do not hold still.

"Literally" now means "figuratively" in common usage. "Decimate" originally meant to kill one in ten; it now means to devastate. "Woke" migrated from an African-American vernacular expression of political awareness to a mainstream progressive identity marker to a political pejorative — in roughly fifteen years. These shifts are not merely interesting: they change what arguments are available, which coalitions are possible, and what policies feel legitimate.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy provides the theoretical grounding: words do not have fixed meanings determined by their reference to the world. They have meanings determined by use — by the language games people play with them in particular contexts and communities. When the community changes, the game changes, and the word changes with it.

Semantic drift takes several forms. Natural drift is organic evolution through changing usage — inevitable, mostly benign, occasionally confusing. Concept creep, identified by Nick Haslam, is the expansion of a concept's boundaries, typically in psychology and social discourse: "trauma", "addiction", and "abuse" have all expanded substantially from their clinical origins, gaining explanatory power and losing diagnostic precision simultaneously. Deliberate semantic capture is strategic: political and commercial actors invest in changing what a word means because the word controls a contested domain. "Freedom", "natural", "sustainable", and "wellness" are all sites of ongoing definitional struggle.

This skill traces a word's semantic trajectory, identifies the mechanism of drift, and assesses the consequences of the shift.


Your Process

Step 1: Establish the Starting Point Identify the term or concept under analysis. Establish its origin meaning:

  • The technical or etymological original (if relevant)
  • The commonly understood meaning at a specific historical moment
  • The formal or disciplinary definition if one exists

Read the full file on GitHub · 138 lines

Changes

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.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 138 lines · 100 tokens per session scan A 5d6b91e6c88e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

s4h-linguistics-semantic-drift is a skill published in the GitHub repository human-avatar/skills-for-humanity (223 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 100 tokens to every session and 2,078 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.

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