Revenge of the quote (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Jonathan Lighter]

I concur.

Only two sentences in the quoted passage were copied. One consisted of nine
words (four of them the names of states conjoined by "and") and the other
was mostly an 1893 quotation, which Zacaria carefully identified. Both
sentences were merely factual.

While Zacaria obviously copied the two sentences from Lepore, they could
have been written by anyone with access to the same information

No one has claimed that he intended to pass off another author's unique
insights or putative "trademark style" as his own, which is what I
believe most people would regard as  "plagiarism." When the passages are
set side by side, Zacaria's debt is obvious and embarassing, but I can't
see it as any more than that.

Zacaria's carelessness was brought to public attention by the
not-uninterested National Rifle Association. Its concerns with gun control
are not at all matters of style.

JL

On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 11:22 AM, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC <
Bill.Mullins at us.army.mil> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Mullins, Bill AMRDEC" <Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL>
> Subject:      Re: Revenge of the quote (UNCLASSIFIED)
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> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
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>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On
> Behalf Of
> > Amy West
> > Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2012 8:23 AM
> > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> > Subject: Re: Revenge of the quote
> >
> > On 8/16/12 12:01 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
> > >
> >
> > I flip
> > back to the end notes to read every single one in popular books by
> > Crystal, McWhorter, Lynch and now I'm doing it with _Is That a Fish in
> > Your Ear?_. Perhaps more normal readers don't.
>
> Hear, hear.  One of my favorite books is Martin Gardner's "The Annotated
> Alice".  Footnotes are the whole point of that book.
>
> And reading books with heavy end notes (whether at the end of the
> chapter or book) just about has to be done in a paper version, with
> paper bookmarks.  I'm slowly going through Robert Caro's biography of
> Lyndon Johnson on a tablet, and the reading software doesn't accommodate
> flipping back and forth every time you hit a quote very easily.
>
>
> >
> > (Honestly, I'm not surprised re: the larger story of plagiarism by
> > Zakaria: he's outputting *a lot*, and I think with such a volume
> you're
> > going to end up doing that either intentionally or unintentionally.)
>
> And the plagiarism he did, in the grand scheme of things, looks to be
> more of a venial than mortal case.  Apparently he (or as is likely, an
> intern or staffer, but he still is responsible) took a couple of
> relatively short passages, lightly re-wrote them, and ran them without
> attribution.  Compare this to MLK JR's wholesale academic plagiarism, or
> Jayson Blair.
>
>
> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
> Caveats: NONE
>
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