"many" is not a weasel word after "how"

A sentence like the following should not trigger "many" is a weasel word and can weaken meaning, should it?

How many entries should get displayed before and after the current one?

[Vorror]

How about adding an option to pass in an “exclude json”(Which could be passed in via command line) which would allow the user to exclude a word + check. Example:

{
    "weasel" : ["how"]
}

Maybe that would help?

[RichardLitt]

I am not sure that dialogue is a useful metric for deciding on the grammaticality of a term. Anything can be used in dialogue, even this. If anything, quoted dialogue is more likely to contain informal language, anyway.

The main difference that I see is the use of many in interrogatives, as opposed to many as an adjective. The part of speech is fluid (as far as I can tell, although this is off of the cusp and may not be an accurate assessment).

Here is a good breakdown of the uses of many.

Hard coding is a possible solution. Personally, I wouldn’t bother - this is one of many possible exceptions to the weasel word concept. “How many entries are allowed” is no less clear to me than “What is the limit of entries”, which is a different question, too.

Instead of hard coding, just take the weasel word line with a grain of salt, and ignore it. Otherwise, we’d have to basically build a grammar of English, which is well out of the scope of this module.