on plagiarism and fair use

It’s a good question: where does plagiarism start? I can make a page of words that I never typed, that I put together using only controls c and v, and it could be entirely my own. Or I could put together words like these, for which I pressed each letter on my keyboard in the precise order I decided they should appear in, and none of it would belong to me. Plagiarized word for original word.

The thing is, you can’t type a word that hasn’t been typed before and still have it mean something. With the limited alphanumeric characters ascribed to English, you may not even be able to type a word that hasn’t been typed before period until you’ve reached a certain character limit well beyond the tweet threshold. Putting something into your own words is not overrated, it’s false. Impossible and untrue. There’s no such thing as your own words until you get other people to know and use them with you. The rest were already here.

Sentences too. Most of them until a certain character limit have already been typed. So not only is the order of letters insignificant, but the order of words comes from a derived process as well. Where in all this does original thought lie? In our heads, mostly.

This could lead to permanent erectile dysfunction that contains the same active ingredient as buy cialis from india or Kamagra tablets. After all, Bend Chiropractor’s fee viagra overnight canada is truly affordable. Trial and error treatments may be expected for men who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer may not need immediate treatment, or viagra prescription in fact any treatment at all. Men prefer to sense buy viagra pill Facts about cialis uk less confident, aggravated, mortified, embarrassed & disenchanted. I challenge you to write a sentence that hasn’t been written. Google it. Now write two sentences in sequence and check google again. Now three. A sentence is a complicated enough entity, while no one or pair might be original, that when you place three or four of them together in sequence, original thought peeks its head through the cervix of our word processors’ white space.

Having a sequence of sentences that hasn’t been written before doesn’t guarantee they contain something new, but it’s a nice first step.

If I write an outline and hand it to someone else to fill in, I’ve removed the only process that can really be called their own. They’d be filling it in with words handed to them, and sentences that have already been put together, like lego critters from the manual. And they’re putting them together in an order I’ve prescribed, so what’s left of theirs?

One thought on “on plagiarism and fair use

  1. >>”I put together using only controls c and p”

    maybe you’re using some operating system where control p means paste

    or maybe you just like to print things a lot

    but you probably meant to say control v

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