Those other modern languages aren’t English, either. I could have picked Goethe; that’s probably still read in the original more often. Either you really mean the English-language canon, or you can just proselint your English translation. And if more than 30% of your “Western Canon” was originally written in English, then it’s a biased selection.
So, I’ve had a closer look at it. It doesn’t look for bad metaphors, it checks for a list of known bad metaphors frequently used in the English language.
Proselint is, essentially, a list of arbitrary sequences of words that various allegedly smart people have declared to be bad.
On the example page at proselint.com/write I hardly found anything that’s not tied to the English language, or the surrounding culture. Yes, “et. al” is as wrong in German and Latin as it is in English. But apart from that, punctuation rules are different, and people overuse different bad metaphors, and make different usage mistakes.
The very idea that “filthy language” is something that I might want an automated checker to tell me about is something that completely fails to translate into my own culture.
And as usual, many of these suggestions depend a lot on what audience you’re writing for, and some are a bit strange.
If the words “mutatis mutandis” appear anywhere in a text, that’s bad style because using Latin is pretentious and people should speak English. If something is centipede-like, that’s bad because by failing to use the word “scolopendrine” instead you’re showing your lack of education.
Conclusion: proselint is not a grammar checker. It’s a syntax highlighter applied to the English language.
