Response to Part II�Being Rhetorical When We Teach Intellectual Property and Fair Use
Year: 2011
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Let’s start with the obvious: Language is a shared resource. I wrote that five-word phrase—“language is a shared resource”—all by my-self. I swear I did, or I thought I did. But then I did a phrase search in Google and discovered that the phrase is not original! It was said before, in a 2002 book by Tor Nørretranders called The Generous Man. Well, that’s not quite true—actually, the phrase is the English translation by Jonathan Sydenham of a phrase Nørretranders expressed in Danish. The English phrase also appeared in a 2006 article by J.C. Spender in a business journal, so he must have plagia-rized it from Nørretranders—or, rather, Sydenham. What a trail of deceit; it’s all very dense and confusing. Things get even worse. The more egregious act of plagiarism in paragraph one is actually the phrase “let’s start with the obvious, ” a journalistic cliché of the first rank. Don’t even bother to Google search that one—it’s ubiquitous in sports and entertainment features, in editorials, in advertising. I thought what I wrote as paragraph one was my own, but clearly it is not. I must have plagiarized it, the entire first two sentences of my paper. The textual evidence is conclusive, incontrovertible, damning. Am I to be charged with academic dishonesty, along with Steve Westbrook, who admits to stealing a phrase from Raymond Carver for the title of his chapter? Or else... Maybe I’m just unoriginal. Maybe I think in clichés. Maybe I am prone to ignorantly parroting phrases from my linguistic discourse community—like
Author: James E. Porter
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4235570824