Claude is obsessed with "the way"

I've noticed over the last 6 months or so, that Claude often includes "the way" in any creative writing task, often even persuasive tasks too. I got it to write a fancy version of an old Aesop Fable, and it used it 5 times. I don't know where it's got this quirk from, but once you see it you can't unsee it. The river was low that year, the color of weak tea, and it moved without hurry between banks gone soft and cracked with early heat. Along the near shore, where the mud gave way to a fringe of bent reeds, the frog sat with his throat working slowly, watching the water the way an old man watches weather he no longer trusts . The scorpion came down through the reeds sideways, the way scorpions do , his tail curled up over his back like a question he was in no hurry to ask. He stopped a little distance off, close enough to be seen and no closer, and waited until the frog's eye rolled toward him. "I need to cross," the scorpion said. "The water's too much for me alone." The frog did not answer right away. He had lived a long time on that stretch of river, long enough to have buried the memory of every creature that had ever asked him for something, and long enough to know that memory was cheap and mostly useless anyway. "You'll sting me," the frog said finally. "Halfway out. You'll sting me and we'll both go under." The scorpion's claws opened and closed once, a small dry sound like a twig settling. "And why would I do that," he said, "when it would drown us both? I'm not a fool. I want to live same as you." The frog turned this over. It had the shape of good sense. It fit into the day the way a stone fits into a wall , snug and unremarkable, and the frog was tired, and the sun was already laying its weight on the water, and there was a kind of comfort in an answer that asked nothing more of him than to believe it. So he let the scorpion climb onto the wide plate of his back, and he felt the small dry weight of him settle just behind his head, and he pushed off from the mud into the slow brown current. For a while it was only the sound of his own legs working and the small tick of the scorpion's feet finding their balance with each kick. The far bank came up slow the way far banks do , a green smudge that took its time turning into willows, into shade, into something a person could call a destination. Then, past the middle of the river, where the current pulled hardest and the light lay flattest on the water, the frog felt it — a small sharp pressure low on his back, no bigger than a thorn stepped on in the dark. It did not even hurt very much, at first. It was the kind of thing a man might not mention at supper. "Why," the frog said, and found that the word came out smaller than he meant it to, the current already finding the numbness spreading down through his legs. "You've killed us both." The scorpion did not look at him. He was looking instead at the water rising up brown and patient around them both, at the willows going soft and unfocused on the shore they would not reach. "I know it," he said. "I couldn't help it. It's my nature." He said it plainly, without apology, the way a man might say the year had been dry , or that winter always came after fall. It was not cruelty in his voice. It was only fact, arriving too late to be of any use to either of them. The current took them down and around, past the bend where the reeds grew thick, and the water closed back over itself smooth and brown as it had been before either of them had ever stood upon its bank, wanting only to be somewhere else.