# `[2026-09-17]` lv-mccarthy D1→D3 — built, gated, and every stage caught a defect in the stage before it **`~/lv-mccarthy/` on pfi-gx10.** `corpus-clean/` (167 units, 584,716 words), `corpus-renamed/` (6 copies, 1,002 records), `scripts/`. Commits `705fa3a` `f3bf3ca` `0fa68cb` `5aa10bf` `5ddb047`. ``` leak gate 0 of 75 renameable and 0 of 37 sub-threshold survive in any copy positive control 108/108 surfaces found in the unrenamed source negative control nonce absent from both trees ``` ## The shared splitter: choose by SIZE, not by count `scripts/r49-corpus/split_units.py`. The inherited rule was "most units above a floor", which is wrong for any book whose markers are PARTS: ``` Cities of the Plain 4 roman marks -> 4 units, median 22,312w The Crossing 4 roman marks -> 4 units, median 37,310w ``` Four beats one, so it won, and the old guard only fired at exactly one unit. Now: a mode qualifies only if its median unit is inside **[600, 12000]** AND no unit holds half the work; among qualifying modes **priority** breaks the tie (contents > chapter-word > roman > bare-numeral > caps-title). Works with no divisions fall back to **paragraph-block sections**. ⭐⭐ **The first version of that rule was WORSE than what it replaced, and a control caught it.** Scoring by "median closest to target" chose `caps-title` over the real chapters of Hemingway's *True at First Light*: ``` bare-numeral 20 units median 5,337w max 11,155 <- the book's own chapters caps-title 6 units median 777w max 113,886 <- median looked BETTER ``` Five stray all-caps lines gave five tiny units beside **one holding 97% of the book**. A median cannot see that distribution; a max bound can. Controls green both ways afterwards: 8/10 Hemingway works reproduce the shipped mode and count exactly, and 40,000 words with no blank lines returns **1 unit** rather than fabricating sections. ⚠ The Hemingway builder is deliberately NOT repointed at this module — its corpus is shipped and its sha is pinned by a live adapter. ## D1: the job was protecting a style that reads as damage ``` quote marks 0.0 per 10k (Hemingway 838) apostrophes 123 per 10k (Hemingway 241) `dont` `aint` `wont` `didnt` ``` ⚠⚠ **`repair_typography.py` MUST NOT be run on this corpus.** It normalises "toward what the text does" and would put the quotation marks back. The builder runs no normalisation and then **asserts** the quote density, so a future well-meaning change fails the build. ⚠ **AND IT MAKES THE VOICE GATE EASY TO PASS FOR THE WRONG REASON.** `voice_distance.py` is Burrows's Delta over CHARACTER BIGRAMS. An adapter that learns only "emit no quotation marks" moves delta_cb a long way without having learned a sentence. **Pre-register a punctuation-normalised secondary read before gating lv-mccarthy.** Tracked in the builder docstring, commit `f3bf3ca`. Also: two truncated catalogue rows dropped for complete mobi siblings; all 15 cross-work containment pairs measured (worst **0.10%**); back matter in 4 of 6 works carrying the author's name 26 times → **0**; alphabet re-derived at 1,411 non-ASCII letters across 14 Spanish forms. ⚠ The back-matter strip runs **BEFORE** the split for McCarthy, inverting the Hemingway order: Blood Meridian and The Crossing end with a dumped table of contents made of bare roman numerals on their own lines — the exact shape of a chapter marker. ## D2 caught a D1 defect: three small-caps manglings The entity map returned `E`, `H`, `T`, `K` as renameable entities with 17–33 capitalised occurrences each — the `G` class from Hemingway, where `G` was about to be renamed to a surname 248 times. Reading them showed the extractor mangled small-caps openings three ways: ``` 1. SPLIT INITIAL `T HE HOUSE was built` -> `The house was built` 32 cases 2. UNMARKED RUN `THEY STOOD in the doorway` -> `They stood in the doorway` 88 cases 3. LOST INITIAL `HE CANDLEFLAME` -> `THE CANDLEFLAME` 1 case ``` Rule 1 requires a FOLLOWING all-caps word, so `A TV was playing` and `A Mexican was changing` are untouched. Rule 2's `[a-z]` lookahead is what makes it safe — a genuine shout or sign is not followed mid-sentence by lowercase. All 23 distinct first words of the 88 were checked. ⚠⚠ **A fourth "fix" was nearly shipped that would have CORRUPTED the text.** `HEY RODE` → `THEY RODE` looked right from a survey of the BUILT corpus. The raw master has `THEY RODE` intact, twice — `HEY RODE` matched as a SUBSTRING, and the unanchored replace produced `TTHEY RODE`, which rule 2 then lowercased to `Tthey rode`. Caught by the count assertion (expected 1, replaced 2) and settled by reading the master. ⚠ My first corruption check also missed it, searching for `TTHEY` when the pipeline had already lowercased it — **check the shape the pipeline emits, not the shape you imagined.** ## D2's own gates: and `audit_stoplist` was scanning its own rationale ⚠⚠ **A defect in `audit_stoplist.py`, latent for every corpus before this one.** It built its surface set from every list value in the stoplist JSON — including `_why`, which by convention is a LIST OF PROSE LINES. Its empty separator line matched the honorific pattern **139 times**, printing a flag with no surface name above the one real catch. Now skips `_`-prefixed keys. That real catch was a contradiction **inside my own file**: `Franklin` sat in the geography list (the old name for El Paso) while the same file's note recorded *"I'm here to see Mr Franklin"*, a lawyer in All the Pretty Horses. A second self-inflicted one: a speculative A–Z fragments list stoplisted `I` and `A`, and `Sir I dont think I can do that` duly tripped the audit. It is now the four letters actually measured as entities. Everything ambiguous was read in context: **Socorro is the ranch cook, not the New Mexico town**; Niño, Keno and Redbo are HORSES (renameable, the `Inglés` precedent); Yaqui and Gilenos are real peoples; Hashknives is a real cattle outfit; Hearst, Trias, Huerta and Madero are real historical figures on the page under their own names. Final: 123 map surfaces, 124-surface stoplist, `entities.py` 27/27 controls, both audits PASS. ## The human gender pass is an auditable file The honorific/window resolver scored **21 correct / 3 held / 1 WRONG** against a 26-name control; the base-rate proximity resolver built for Hemingway scored 18/6/1 and **its own guard correctly REFUSED to write**. So the incumbent stands and four entries are fixed by hand in `gender_overrides_mccarthy.json`, each carrying its evidence. ⚠ All four are female and all four look male-dominated in raw counts, because this corpus runs **29,144 male pronouns to 5,036 female — a base rate of 85.3% male**. Carla Jean Moss at 31m/21f would be 44m/8f at that rate; 21 against an expected 8 is decisive. Same arithmetic that recovered Pilar and Brett on Hemingway. Alfonsa was in the control and is correctly absent from the map at 4 occurrences, below the min-count floor — an error in the control, not the pipeline. `apply_gender_overrides.py` refuses twice: a name absent from the map is an error rather than a silent no-op, and overruling a gender the detector holds needs an explicit `"correcting": true` so it cannot look like filling a held entity in a diff. ## D3: three calls, and the holdout fix that matters most 1. **`--scope corpus`**, not the per-work default. Nine surfaces appear in more than one work — Parham (The Crossing + Cities of the Plain), Grady and Cole (All the Pretty Horses + Cities of the Plain), Socorro, Héctor. A per-work map gives John Grady a different invented name in each novel, turning one character into two. 2. **A new `mccarthy` preset.** Hemingway's romance pool carries `it_IT` and `fr_FR` for his Italian and French casts; McCarthy writes neither language. `en_GB` goes for the same reason. `en_US` + `es_MX`/`es_ES` at an even share. 3. **`--min-cap 5` to match the entity map's floor.** The first gate run FAILED with 45 survivors: `entities.py` admits cap ≥ 5 while `rename.py` renamed only cap ≥ 8, so every entity between sat in the map, was never renamed, and counted as a leak. Hemingway never hit it because its map had `sub_threshold_total: 0`. ⭐ **`--holdout-chapter` NOW TAKES A LIST.** The val split is one chapter index per work, so its SIZE is set by how many WORKS a corpus has, not how many words: ``` Hemingway 10 works -> 9 val units -> 36,563 words/copy -> gate DECISIVE Brontë 4 works -> 4 val units -> 17,043 words/copy -> gate MARGINAL McCarthy 6 works -> 6 val units -> ~18,000 would have been Brontë's end ``` Holding out chapters **7 and 17** gives **11 units and 40,653 words per copy — larger than Hemingway's** — for 7% of the corpus, on a corpus 40% smaller than his. No amount of corpus size fixes a val split that scales with work count. Related: [[2026-09-17-lv-hemingway-gate]], [[2026-09-17-mccarthy-krakauer-d1]], [[2026-09-17-lv-bronte-gate]].