Site running get_the_title through a thesaurus filter for some reason

Random blog posts in our system are running the title field through what looks like a thesaurus filter and it’s driving me crazy. You can see the effect here:

https://liberalartssuccess.org/headlines

The article:
“Bucknell sophomore heads for Sultanate of Oman for soak in Arabic”

Should read:
“Bucknell sophomore heads for Sultanate of Oman for immersion in Arabic”

The title field reads as the latter; something is happening where WordPress parses out synonyms of words.

I have created a custom field to give authors the opportunity to truncate/change the official title with something else; if we paste the true title into that field, all is well.

Here is the code being used to differentiate whether or not one uses the custom field:

$title_fight	  = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'story_title', true) ;		// Are we going with a hand-crafted title or not?
	if ( $title_fight == '' ) {
		 $title_fight = get_the_title($post->ID);
	}

Any help would be most appreciated.