Word: plagiarist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...indignant Bill Clinton plans to reclaim Truman this week when he opens his fall campaign on Labor Day in Harry's home precinct, Independence, Missouri. Truman's daughter Margaret accused Bush of being a "political plagiarist." Truman biographer David McCullough diplomatically cast some light on the issue. "If George Bush is taking inspiration from Truman, that is one thing," he said. "If he is saying 'I'm Truman,' that's absurd...
...still sorry about it. (Especially since Mrs. Rubin owned the same children's poetry book.) Professor Richard Marius, the director of Harvard's expository writing program, once wrote a story about a public hanging--then found the same exact story underneath someone else's byline 15 years later. (The plagiarist died soon afterwards. Coincidence? Perhaps...
...HEIGHT of the Vietnam War, Marius listened to Lyndon Johnson recite a paragraph of a Winston Churchill speech almost word-for-word. Marius's reaction: "I thought, 'That son-of-a-bitch! Not only is he a murderer, but he's a plagiarist...
...Commandments warn against stealing, against bearing false witness, against coveting. Plagiarius is kidnapper in Latin. The plagiarist snatches the writer's brainchildren, pieces of his soul. Plagiarism gives off a shabby metaphysic. Delaware's Senator Joseph Biden, during the 1988 presidential primaries, expanded the conceptual frontier by appropriating not just the language of British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock but also of his poignant Welsh coal-mining ancestors. Biden transplanted the mythic forebears to northeastern Pennsylvania. He conjured them coming up out of the mines to play football. "They read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing...
...intermingle passages, reshuffle sentences, disguise raw chunks from the Britannica, find synonyms, reshape information until it becomes something like the student's own. A writer, as Saul Bellow has said, "is a reader moved to emulation." Knowledge transforms theft. An autonomous mind emerges from the sloughed skin of the plagiarist...