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Last week my broadcast revealed an incredible insight into the Great American Psyche---no, of course I don’t mean that anything I said was the revelation, I mean what surrounded it.
If you remember last week dealt with the horror and danger of saying “MacBeth” and I apparently collapsed at the end of it.
Did Simon rush to my resuscitation? Did he call for an ambulance or a hearse? Did he even worry about who could possibly fill this spot? No! How could he? He is now so thoroughly Americanised that he leaped on my one throwaway line about plagiarism and seemed to base most of the next hour on it.
In America today, apart from some of the more gaudy forms of murder, plagiarism is the ne plus ultra of evil, and the plagiarist is to the modern American mind the equal of Vlad the Impailer, and has so far surpassed Attila the Hun that that worthy has had to be renamed Attila the Honey1.
Time was (by the way I pinched that from Alistair Cooke), time was when taking bits out of other peoples works, preferably without attribution was looked upon, not as a crime, but as a sport---a bit of plagiarism was a lovesome thing God wot, and if you weren’t up to the challenge of spotting the stolen bits then you shouldn’t be reading the literature. In those brave days of yore education largely consisted in learning large chunks of poetry and prose, and skilled writing (in part) in being able to regurgitate and manipulate them at will and skilled reading in being able to recognise them at sight.
Now-a-days of course, in those profound dull tunnels which titanic bores have groyned, nobody seems to read anything worth learning and we have lost the more athletic parts of the study of literature, so that even many modern professors are perhaps less familiar with absolutely everything than one might, under ideal circumstances, desire: more or less.
Then, in that golden age, if you handed in work which was not entirely unoriginal the knowing, wise professor would most certainly be familiar with the unacknowledged attributions of the good bits and would kindly suggest work on your own bad bits.
But now-a-days, now-a-days the poor fellow is more likely to feel blindsided. Earlier I mentioned murder, and in the same breath as plagiarism too, and I think that at last we’ve come back to it because in its early, Anglo-Saxon and Germannic, history murder wasn’t just wilful bumping off it was bumping off done secretly, and especially bumping off done at night, when, in those days before electric lighting, the poor sap couldn’t see what was coming. The relative enormity of night killing (as distinct from, say, afternoon killing which was usually OK in the early Middle Ages) lay in this blindside-ly character.
“Then said Arinbjorn: ‘The king should not yield to be urged to this shameful deed. He should not let Egil be killed at night, because killing by night is murder and not attributing this quote is plagiarism.’”
Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton
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Notes:
1 One should note that this was only after having to fight my youngest daughter Rowena Margaret Nancy Sarah Hroþwyn Howland-Bolton for the priviledge.
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