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Every other columnist in America has had fun with Sen. Joe Biden's problems with plagiarism. Now it's my turn, although I'm going to discuss the issue, rather than its effect on his campaign, since he's no longer a candidate.
Like a bad credit rating, plagiarism is one of those regrettable things that's nearly impossible to avoid if you make your living by working with words.
Big-time writers run into trouble -- recall how Alex
Haley had to shell out some of his ample earnings from
Roots? It afflicts song writers; a court determined
that George Harrison filched much of My Sweet Lord
from He's So Fine.
And it crops up often in
political prose.
John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address contained the
stirring phrase, Ask not what your country can do for
you -- ask what you can do for your country.
Of course, those were really the words of John Kenneth
Galbraith, who ghosted most of that address. But could
Galbraith have been cribbing from Oliver Wendell Holmes? At
an 1884 Memorial Day address in New Hampshire, the justice
said We pause ... to recall what our country has done for
each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our
country in return.
In all of politics, the greatest master of English prose
was Winston Churchill. Among his memorable phrases is his
observation of 1946: From Stettin in the Baltic to
Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended
across the continent.
We still refer to the Iron Curtain around the Soviet bloc. But who said it first?
Not Churchill. Of all people, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi
minister of propaganda, on Feb. 23, 1945, predicted that if
the Third Reich did not win on the Eastern Front, the
whole of east and southeastern Europe... would come under
Russian occupation. Behind an Iron Curtain, mass butcheries
of the people would begin...
We can go back further, perhaps to 1914, when Queen
Elizabeth of Belgium said that between her country and
Germany there is now a bloody Iron Curtain which as
descended forever.
How consider Isaac Newton, who invented calculus,
discovered the law of gravitation and otherwise enlightened
mankind. In 1676, he wrote that If I have seen farther,
it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
He gets the credit for this. But in 1624, Robert Burton,
in the Anatomy of Melancholy, wrote that A dwarf
standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than
the giant himself.
Burton attributed that to Didacus Stella, a Roman writer
of about 50 A.D., but those sentiments appear nowhere in
Stella's works. The earliest use appears to be Bertrand of
Chartres in 1126, who observed that In comparison with
the ancients, we stand like dwarfs on the shoulders of
giants.
Phrases are like that. You're writing along and something perfectly appropriate pops into your head. Since it came so quickly, you probably saw it somewhere else -- but where? Oscar Wilde? H.L. Mencken? Yesterday's newspaper?
Even when you're sure you invented it, you can't be positive you could prove you didn't plagiarize it. I recall once sweating and straining for a simile to describe cold weather. The writing was for a family publication, so I couldn't use the familiar phrases about various anatomical parts of witches and well-diggers.
So I pondered what might be the coldest thing
imaginable, and came up with Colder than a banker's
heart.
But then I started seeing the phrase all the
time.
Were they stealing my line? Maybe. But in some cases, that was impossible, for the works bore copyrights earlier than my coining of the phrase. But I hadn't read them back when I was deliberately formulating the line.
It's an awful feeling, either way. You're either a thief
or a victim. And most of the time, you've signed a contract
to the effect that author warrants that this work shall
be original and free from plagiarism, and said work does
not violate or infringe any copyright...
You just do the best you can, and hope that no hungry lawyers read your stuff.
(CONSCIENCE NOTE: See The Great Thoughts,
compiled by George Seldes, as well as his The Great
Quotations. And now it's my turn
above may have
been unconsciously derived from a Gary Hart campaign slogan
of 1974. Also read On the Shoulders of Giants by
Robert K. Merton, which elevates pedantry to hilarity while
explaining much more about this problem.)
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