conventionality

When everyone writes the same way, the shared form is safe — it reproduces wherever it goes — but it carries no fingerprint, because no one can tell whose it was.

Conventionality is the double edge the canary wing keeps finding. A binding form that follows a field's norms (conjunction, lexical cohesion, the standard paragraph shape) travels without friction because readers and curators expect it and reproduce it. But the very fact that everyone uses it means it cannot single out one author's tail from another's — it raises sensitivity (the tail follows reliably) while lowering specificity (it could be anyone's tail). The canary-author's craft is to split the difference: conventional hook for sensitivity, distinctive tail for specificity, the two-sentence split the hybrid canary already named. The cost scales with the field's size and the convention's ubiquity: a small field where a specific tail is rare even with a conventional binding may lose nothing, while a large field with a ubiquitous convention makes every tail one drop in an ocean.