To Borrow a Phrase

Sadly, these lines were borrowed from me back in 1959 by a comic singer named Tom Lehrer for a ballad, chiefly lyrical, about the enduring influence of the 19th-century Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky. Do people still listen to Tom Lehrer? The composer of such uplifting odes as “I Got It from Agnes,” “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” and “The Masochism Tango,” he somehow managed to be the man Groucho Marx would have been if Groucho Marx had been a Harvard mathematics instructor–which makes it all the stranger that he risked plagiarizing from me these lines about plagiarism.

Of course, in its way, the theft merely proves my timeless originality. It’s a compliment, really, that much of what I do is claimed by others. So influential are my thoughts and phrasings that a great number are actually pre-stolen–taken by other writers before I can even get around to thinking or saying them.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife–that was me.

The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two shorter sides–also me.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix–me, me, me.

But I repeat myself. Last week I picked up a copy of Richard A. Posner’s latest little book, The Little Book of Plagiarism. Posner is a federal circuit judge who seems to publish books more often than the average person can read them, and he wants to exempt lawyers and judges from the charge of copying. It’s not their job to make their work original; it’s their job to make their work right. So if one lawyer copies another’s compelling argument, or a judge uses a clerk to write a strong opinion, there should be no complaint. But in the arenas of academic writing, journalism, and popular book publishing, The Little Book of Plagiarism takes a common sense view of the subject: Plagiarism is more a violation of professional ethics than a criminal offense; there’s a difference between allusion and theft; the new electronic media make plagiarism simultaneously easier to commit and easier to catch, etc.

Along the way, Posner glances at many of the plagiarism scandals of recent years. There was, for instance, Laurence Tribe, the Harvard law professor who borrowed material for his history of Supreme Court nominations. And Charles J. Ogletree, another Harvard law professor, who bulked up his book on the Brown decision with copied pages. And Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard undergraduate who plagiarized passages in the chick-lit novel for which she had received a $500,000 advance. And Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Harvard overseer who stole portions of her bestselling histories. (“Fight fiercely, Harvard, fight, fight, fight! / Demonstrate to them our skill,” as Tom Lehrer once urged his alma mater. “Albeit they possess the might, / Nonetheless we have the will.”)

What’s curious is how many of these recent stories of plagiarism were first aired in THE WEEKLY STANDARD. And how often Judge Posner fails to acknowledge THE WEEKLY STANDARD for the material on which he relies (except for one passing claim that the liberal Goodwin may have survived the revelation of her scholarly sins because it was a conservative magazine that carried the story about them).

Of course, those of us working the vineyards are used to others drinking the wine. Still, a little credit every once in a while would be nice. Particularly when so much of what one wants to write has been pre-stolen. I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. As I was just going to say.

JOSEPH BOTTUM