# `[2026-09-21]` My confound detector was counting apostrophes as quote marks, and I saw it FIRE before I saw the bug.

⚠⚠ **My confound detector was counting apostrophes as quote marks, and I saw it FIRE before I saw the bug.** `voice_distance.py`'s quote class shipped with `'` and `’` in it — on the one corpus whose signature is `dont`/`aint`/`wont`. It reported the held-out reference at 121.1 "quote marks" per 10k for a corpus whose builder **ASSERTS 0.0**, and fired the pre-registered trigger on a base arm whose true density is 19.9. Fixing a detector to measure the quantity the frozen rule names is not moving the rule, but the fix un-fires the trigger, which is indistinguishable from shopping — **so the trigger was made MOOT instead of adjudicated**: the normalised read is load-bearing unconditionally, both columns reported, zero verdict effect. ⚠ The lesson: I controlled `strip_punct` (2500→0) and the byte-identity of the default path, and never asked the quote counter for a value whose answer I already knew. Commit `0d80e49`.