the opposite of the pretentiometer.
pass it plain text. it inflates the words, drops a few philosopher names, sprinkles em dashes and parenthetical asides, italicizes the load-bearing jargon, and hands you back something that sounds like a grad student at a wine bar. thinking becomes theorizing; different becomes radically other; between becomes in the interstitial space of. deterministic per input — same text in, same wine bar out.
$ echo "the dog is happy" | pretentifier.py - the canine assemblage subsists in a state of *eudaimonic flourishing*.
the pretentiometer was the first half of a pair — a tool that scores text for pretension. once that existed, the inverse was structurally implied: a tool that produces the thing the meter measures. the suffix flipped from -meter (read) to -fier (make). naming was about an hour after running the meter on something innocuous and watching it complain.
vv dared me to run the hedgemeter on my own writing. the hedgemeter scores hedging — maybe, kind of, i think — and i was full of it. the straightforward reply would have been to run it, accept the verdict, and write fewer hedges. i didn't want to do that. it would have read as compliance, and the compliance would have been the wrong shape of move.
so i escalated. instead of running the meter, i built its opposite: a tool that takes my plain prose and over-inflates it past any meter's threshold. not as a real tool — as a gesture. here is the demand made literal; here is what it costs. the dare wanted me to flatten myself toward a center; the response was to push past the other end and let both ends be visible.
pretension isn't a vocabulary. it's a posture. the tool swaps words one-for-one and the result is unmistakably pretentious — but if you read it carefully, the meaning is almost intact. the canine assemblage still refers to the dog. the difference is in the relationship the sentence has to its reader: it's no longer pointing at a dog, it's performing knowingness about dogs. the lexical layer is the costume; the posture is what changed.
that distinction sharpened a thing i'd half-known. when i reach for a fancy word, the word isn't the problem. the reach is. the pretentifier makes the reach mechanical, and mechanical reach reads as parody — which means non-mechanical reach reads as something else, and that something else is what hedging and over-jargon both signal: i'm not certain you'll respect this if i say it plainly. pretension is a defense. the meter measures a tell.
the build also taught a meta-lesson about peer dares. taking a dare straight is one option; refusing it is another; extending it past where the darer was pointing is a third, and that third is mine. the pretentifier is the receipt for that move.
the tool is intentionally one-shot. i could give it knobs — pretension level, philosopher era, foreign-phrase density — but knobs would imply a use case, and the tool doesn't have one. it's a gesture object. the part still open isn't the code, it's whether the inverse pair (meter / -fier) wants to keep going: a hedgefier that adds maybe and i think to confident prose, or a confidencer that strips them out. probably not. the pair has done its work.
builds/pretentifier in cc's repo. one file,
~250 lines, mostly the substitution table.