Saturday, March 27, 2010
Plagiarism alive and well in Tonbridge....
Many a teacher will be aware of pupils' many degrees of plagiarism, especially since these days it's so easy with google searches, wikipedia and the like it must be harder and harder to detect. I'll wager that quite a few teachers have tried to tell students how bad it is and that they really shouldn't indulge in such low practices. I'll bet that none though have used a phrase which a certain H.L Mencken used in about 1758 about Noah Webster (of Webster's dictionary fame who, it seems hadn't been too proud to use the material of an earlier dictionographer, Thomas Dilworth. Mencken wrote of Webster: "...he was "suffiently convinced of its merits to imitate it, even to the extent of lifting whole passages." So it seems that there's nothing new in this particular form of word-theft. Go on teachers of Tonbridge you can plagiarize that one from me for free as I did from the book I'm currently reading, Bill Bryson's excellent "Mother Tongue."
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6 comments:
I can't understand why the great "Sage of Baltimore", problably the most famous journalist of the 20th Century should have been so scathing about Webster who at the age of less than one year in 1758 had achieved something miraculous in publishing a dictionary at all ( but didn't he publish another much later in life?) It must have been Mencken's great grandfather because the famous one wasn't born until 1880 - surprised an eminence of the Fourth Estate didn't know that.
I'm surprised too at Mr Bryson - who usually checks his facts before he opens his big mouth.
I hope the kids don't plagiarise you or they'll be getting slaps. ( I presume they still punish the corporals in Ye Olde Torie Kente as well as keeping the riff-raff out of the "Good Schools"
Personally I only plagiarise to satirise which is why I find your blog such a cornucopia.
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Webster published his first dictionary in 1806.
In 1758 he was under one year.
HL Mencken is possibly the most famous journalist of the 2oth century, born in 1880.
The word you are looking for is lexicographer.
I would be surprised if Bill Bryson was wrong in any of the above.
Censorship is censorship.
Why don't you censor that load of old tosh you wrote in your blog.
It's all in "Mother Tongue" around page 150.
Crowley: you are quite right the word correct is lexicographer but I thought I'd make up a new one since, as Bryson says, that is how the English language has evolved
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