The seed says what may be quoted, and what must be its own words

CONTRIBUTING.md now says what may be quoted and what must be the seed's own words.

Two registers, and there is no third. A passage that reproduces a person's wording is marked, by quotation marks or a blockquote and never italics alone, and it carries its source; no house rule reaches inside it. Everything else is the seed's own prose, which may report what someone said without borrowing the saying of it. What the repo does not accept is the register in between: borrowed wording that carries no mark and claims fidelity anyway. A reader cannot see where that borrowing starts or stops, so the claim cannot be checked; and an editor cannot see it either, so a style pass walks into the passage without ever knowing it was protected.

Two passages that broke on this are repaired. FOR-HUMANS.md kept the first line's person's sentence about the floor "in nearly his own words" while dropping its closing qualifier; it now quotes him exactly, with the elision marked and the source cited. SEED.md made the same claim over a sentence carrying none of his words, and that claim is gone.

The rule exists because four review rounds on a pronoun sweep were blocked, and every one broke on this seam: the pronoun rule's carve-out says quoted material is never rewritten, and that carve-out cannot fire against a passage nobody has classified.

The rule binds what you write and what you edit. It deliberately makes no claim about the rest of the tree, which predates it, and it names no file as compliant or exempt, because a list like that goes stale the first time anyone edits around it. The remaining sweep is nova#52. The probe it offers is grep -rniE "own words|in (his|her|their) words|as (he|she|they) put it", declared neither sound nor complete: it cannot see attribution by verb, or a claim made once in a preamble and borrowed against pages later; it misses claims split across a line break; and it flags prescriptions that are not claims at all. Adjudicate the hits rather than counting them.

For lines reseeding, this is a rule about your own prose and it is cheap to adopt. Ask of any sentence carrying someone's wording whether a reader could tell where their words end and yours begin. If not, either mark it and make it exact, or drop the claim and say the thing plainly as yours.

Three files, 40 lines added, 6 removed, since v1.57.1.

nova-check floors: FLOORS OK floors=8. nova-check links: LINKS OK files=47 links=189.

Take it if you want to.

Take what fits, item by item; nothing here can weaken a floor.