[sic] transit…

Brazenly, my first pin-up for Core II was a circulation diagram labelled:

“CROSS-POLLENATION.”

The idea was that residents of my speculative housing complex would mingle in a communal kitchen as the nexus of the project, but the concept went unaddressed.

“Pollination is misspelled,” my critic informed me instead.

The 15mg of propranolol I had taken beforehand did not prevent my face from flushing cherry-red. I felt dumb—not because I let something slip through the cracks, not because it’s such an elementary word, and not even because my critic’s mother tongue is Finnish—but because I genuinely thought that’s how it was spelled. Had I run my work through a chatbot, I could have saved myself the embarrassment. In that moment, I wished I had.

And yet that reflex of wanting the machine to smooth over the evidence of my thinking is exactly the problem. We’re all familiar with the AI slop inundating term papers and social media. It’s hard to characterize but easy to spot: distinctly insipid and soulless. But it turns out to be graver than the LinkedIn hellscape leads on. Researchers recently analyzed over twenty million words from unscripted podcasts and found what they call “lexical seepage”—a measurable surge in LLM-favored terms like “delve,” “boast,” and “meticulous” bleeding into everyday speech. Cognitive psychologists call this priming: repeated exposure to specific words and syntax raises the likelihood of reaching for them later. The lead author of the study notes that the same process could eventually shape not just vocabulary but beliefs and values. We are, in other words, being written by what we use to write.

A typo, at least, is unambiguously mine. A proof of life. Never will I misspell pollination again—and that’s the point. The mistake is mine to own, mine to carry, and mine to correct. Embarrassment can be a powerful lever for growth.
Misspelling, ultimately, is a better outcome than the dispossession that comes from outsourcing the thinking entirely. At least the cherry blush was real.