Just words: Is it plagiarism, homage, or business as usual when public figures "forget" to footnote?

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:25 AM -0800 2/22/08, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On Feb 22, 2008, at 6:31 AM, Dave Wilton wrote:
>
>>I think it's useful to make a distinction between phrasing that is
>>communally used and phrasing that is associated with a particular
>>individual. The latter is potentially a more serious offense. The
>>former
>>isn't an offense at all.
>
>a further wrinkle: there's no offense in using expressions (quoted or
>paraphrased or played on, snowclone-fashion) from particular people if
>you can expect that most people will know the source.  you don't have
>to attribute "with malice toward none" and the like.

Actually this reminds me of one of the features of the recent
brouhaha.  The network news stories, to demonstrate that Obama was
using other people's lines, kept citing this passage from his speech
in which he was ridiculing the idea that "words don't matter" by
showing him orating along the lines of "The only thing we have to
fear is fear itself--words don't matter?...Ask not what your country
can do for you but what you can do for your country--words don't
matter?..."We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal--words don't matter?" The point being, of course, not
that Obama was plagiarizing FDR, JFK, TJ, whoever, but Duval Patrick,
as if those were his lines (and not that it was the framing itself
that he was borrowing, or "riffing off", as some of the coverage put
it).  This reflects Arnold's point--it's not that either Patrick or
Obama would have needed to quote the sources of these lines, but that
Obama should (according to Hillary et al.) have credited Patrick with
using the lines in the frame the way Patrick did.  The way the story
was presented on at least ABC, though, did seem to suggest that Obama
should have pointed out that it was really Patrick and not Obama
himself who came up with the observation that the only thing we have
to fear is fear itself, and the like.

LH

>
>a problem arises when you use an expression that is attributable to a
>specific person, and you know this, and this attribution isn't widely
>known, and the expression is especially effective or in some way
>memorable, and you don't give any attribution -- thus implicitly
>taking credit yourself for the turn of phrase.
>
>there are, of course, complexities at each stage.  unconscious
>quotation is particularly easy.  you might not realize you heard it
>somewhere, or it might seem vaguely familiar but you have no idea
>where you might have heard it.
>
>so there's plenty of gray area here, but area that's pretty far from
>the instances of plagiarism that trouble teachers so much.
>
>arnold
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org