To Beat a Dead Horse

[alixtii]

Geoffrey Pullum, returning to a subject both he and I have discussed before:

I would have thought we could agree, whatever our feeling about re-using phrases we've enjoyed before, that it only becomes plagiarism when an unattributed passage of non-trivial length is used with the dishonest intent that the borrowed passage should be incorrectly thought to be original. The conjunction of those boldfaced elements should be regarded as definitional, I think. (See my earlier ruminations on plagiarism here and here and here.)

Comments

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

I agree entirely, but has something happened which makes mentioning it now especially apposite?

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Pullum made his new post relatively recently, and I'd been planning to link it since I read it; that's about it. But it's not like those people who think that lifting a sentence from The Secret Garden (or similarly well-known and much-beloved work) ever really go away, even if they're not on my flist and thus I'm preaching to the converted.

[tessarin.livejournal.com]

That was really interesting thank you for the pointer.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

No problem!