BY MARY ANN LINDLEY, Knight Ridder Newspapers, December 08, 2004 - original
At lunch the other day a university professor told me that when he grades student papers, he almost always feels obliged to "Google" them before giving them a grade.
That's one of the great new verbs that comes to us courtesy of the Internet and its powerful search engines, one of which is Google.
People Google each other by going online to see if anything pops up about them -- something they've written or been involved in, a political contribution or something they sell in their business. You Google, I Google, we all Google to find sources of information, dates or any one of a zillion facts and figures that will confirm or support our ideas or merely answer a question on "Jeopardy."
The professor Googles his students' papers to see if they're trying to appear smarter than they are. That is, if they're outrightly borrowing large portions of other people's ideas or language and claiming it for their own.
A phrase that seems too grand for Joey to have come up with on his own, for example, shows up as belonging word for word to -- why, look here! -- Alexis de Tocqueville (always a favorite of the young intellectual).
Recently, you'd accuse those students of plagiarism and give them an "F." Today it takes a good bit of work to track down what's not original in their work, much less make the accusation stick.
In ways, plagiarism is on the brink of extinction. With the Internet and its casual indifference to giving credit where credit is due, only the most extreme advocates of intellectual property rights are still wringing their hands over borrowing or copying phrases or sentences, word for word.
This is a big change from considering plagiarism a clear-cut ethical crime -- in literature especially where it's more or less been decided that copying is never acceptable.
Right now I'm borrowing, in part, some of the information that Malcolm Gladwell has written in an article on plagiarism in the Nov. 22 New Yorker magazine. I'll try not to use any of his exact phrases, because as a journalist I know that's how you keep things on the up and up. You write your own version of some nice, clear explanation or summary of an event or issue that you found in the archives, but you don't do it word for word.
Then it's OK.
I suppose.
Though as Gladwell begins to illustrate as he thinks on paper about borrowing other people's ideas, "the ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences." Great phrase. My derivative way of saying it is that we fool ourselves when we think just tweaking a phrase and probably making it more bland makes it OK to lift -- and then spoil! -- someone else's memorable phrasing.
Gladwell evolves from thinking that "words belong to the person who wrote them" to acknowledging that this may be very close to nonsense.
What are the statistical odds, after all, that in all of English literature you wouldn't find your own wildly original phrasing had already been done?
Thank the Internet for telling you precisely where, when and by whom. And thank the Internet, too, for muddying up credit beyond recognition. The majority of the material that swims around the Internet, popping up in our e-mail, comes without attribution and often without any indication whatever that it is even true.
We lose the fresh trail of a phrase or an idea pretty fast. We come to accept that, as in that child's game, "rumor," which shows how we can't even repeat a rumor accurately, a great phrase evolves and may get better, more succinct, hilarious or clear-eyed with some tweaking.
The "fundamentalists" of plagiarism, as Gladwell imaginatively calls them, perpetuate the idea that "a writer's words have a virgin birth and an eternal life." (What a really good line.)
I suspect that we are now in a place with language where we were 20 years ago with hand-held calculators. We complained that kids would never learn to do mathematics if they were allowed to use calculators in the classroom.
Today, maybe we need to give students credit for knowing where to go for excellent, credible and de Tocqueville-like brilliance if it helps them articulate an idea or synthesize a situation. In other words, aren't they learning by knowing where to look for and how to identify the person who most wisely articulated the issue they're writing about?
The ethical issue that remains irrefutable is that you also give credit. You do not attempt to claim as your own some outrageously apt metaphor or lyrical line of whimsy that you sincerely wish had been yours.
Mary Ann Lindley is editorial page editor at the Tallahassee Democrat.