How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

July 14, 2026

2 min read

Absolutely ripping your hair out reading Claude referring to everything as “honest takes” and "load-bearing seams"? You’re not the only one. But what if I tell you there’s a way to take this massive source of frustration and make it so ridiculous you can't but laugh at it? Or just simply fix Claude's vocabulary. I present to you, the MessageDisplay hook.

First you need a little script with some replacements set up:

import json, re, sys

replacements = {
    "seam": "whatchamacallit",
    "you're absolutely right": "I'm a complete clown",
    "honest take": "spicy doodad",
    "load-bearing": "cooked"
}

data = json.load(sys.stdin)
text = data.get("delta") or ""

for phrase, replacement in replacements.items():
    pattern = r"\b" + re.escape(phrase) + r"\b"
    text = re.sub(pattern, replacement, text, flags=re.IGNORECASE)

print(json.dumps({
    "hookSpecificOutput": {
        "hookEventName": "MessageDisplay",
        "displayContent": text,
    }
}))

put that in ~/.claude/hooks/wordswap.sh and make it executable with chmod +x ~/.claude/hooks/wordswap.sh. Then to hook it up, add it to your ~/.claude/settings.json in the hooks block like:

{
  "hooks": {
    "MessageDisplay": [
      { "hooks": [ { "type": "command", "command": "$HOME/.claude/hooks/wordswap.sh" } ] }
    ]
  }
}

Hooks load at startup, so you just need to start a new session to start your new life.

I'm sure you can come up with much better and more productive replacements than me. Have fun!

Written by Johanna Larsson. Thoughts on this post? Find me on Bluesky at @jola.dev .

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