Word: plagiaristically
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Coming upon my own words, now alienated, I was amused, amazed, flattered, outraged, spooked -- and in a moment, simply pained: I learned that after the article was published, the plagiarist had been found out, by someone else, not me, and had committed suicide...
Plagiarism at least proclaims that some written words are valuable enough to steal. If the language is magnificent, the sin is comprehensible: the plagiarist could not resist. But what if the borrowed stuff is a flat, lifeless mess -- the road kill of passing ideas? In that case there is less risk, but surely no joy at all. (Does the plagiarist ever feel joy?) Safer to steal the duller stones. None but the dreariest specialists will remember them or sift for them in the muck...
...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...
...across an old painting showing the marvellous boy as a middle-aged man. Curious, he begins to pore over some obscure manuscripts. They suggest that Chatterton faked his early death, then continued to write more verse under more assumed names, among them William Blake and Thomas Gray. "The greatest plagiarist in history?" inquires a colleague. "No!" Wychwood argues. "He was the greatest poet in history...