Use Terminology

Apply this skill on every task alongside curate-terminology, without waiting for a wording request. Use the project's accepted terms and expressions while completing the requested task. Give the reader an accurate explanation or a corrected artifact, not an unnecessary glossary report. Established English terms come first; explain their meaning in the reader's language without literal translation that changes the field's meaning.

Read the relevant reference

Read the project's instructions and terminology entry point at the start of every task, then the relevant topic, internal-name, and anti-pattern entries. If no reference exists, use curate-terminology to establish relevant entries from eligible sources as needed; continue the original task without inventing entries or requiring a glossary first. Resolve those links from the document's location. Search within that material before widening to the project's source index; do not load the entire literature collection or a historical glossary merely because it is longer.

Apply entries to their documented domain, version, conditions, and level of claim. Keep an internal identifier distinct from a reader-facing name, a source-specific metric distinct from a general concept, and an editorial restriction distinct from a claim about all industry usage. Explicit project wording decisions take precedence over a generic preference to retain a familiar term; preserve the protected quotations and identifiers specified by that decision.

Preserve confirmed company proper names and local meanings even when industry usage differs. Use local shorthand for internal readers and clarify ambiguous terms for external or mixed readers within the sharing scope. If a small number of local terms remain unclear after checking records, use curate-terminology to ask the user and record the answer. While waiting, preserve the observed name without asserting an unconfirmed meaning; do not repeatedly ask about settled conventions. A legitimate local name is not an anti-pattern by itself.

When the user asks about a term, return the accepted English expression, its contextual meaning, the distinction that resolves the question, and a useful source pointer. Do not turn an ordinary phrase into a named method. When drafting, apply the accepted verbs, collocations, and sentence patterns as well as nouns. Explain who acts on what, under which conditions, and with what observable effect. Reuse how established sources explain a project's purpose and component relationships only when the underlying behavior matches; do not import their architecture or guarantees. Retain the qualifiers that determine meaning. Consult application pitfalls when a familiar label hides a different operation or a stronger claim.

Correct what the task authorizes

The standing policy covers every task: fix confirmed terminology and expression problems in directly managed documents encountered or edited during the work, and use curate-terminology for related reference updates without another correction request. Respect an explicit read-only or review-only restriction: return the exact problem and proposed correction without modifying files.

Quotes, collected originals, archived records, APIs, schemas, and identifiers retain their original form; correct the explanation around them. External edits and publication use the existing authorization for that service. If the original cannot be changed, describe the correction and, when local recording is authorized, put it in the project's correction record.