Christopher Ketcham ("The Troubling Case of Chris Hedges: Pulitzer winner. Lefty hero. Plagiarist.", TNR 6/12/2014) documents several cases of sentences and even paragraphs copied verbatim, as well as other cases of "patchwriting": Robert Drechsel, the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noted that the use of material from Klein, Postman, […]
Pedantry, Dr. Johnson said in the Rambler, is the unseasonable ostentation of learning. And learning is never so unseasonable as when its display impedes the workaday business of making sense. Take the sentence from The Economist that I ran across when I was writing my word-of-the-year piece for Fresh Air on "big data": Yet even […]
Yesterday, Paul Krugman picked up on our "Severely X" post ('Severe Conservative Syndrome", NYT, 2/12/2012): Mitt Romney has a gift for words — self-destructive words. On Friday he did it again, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference that he was a “severely conservative governor.” As Molly Ball of The Atlantic pointed out, Mr. Romney “described […]
The Australian minister of transport and infrastructure, Anthony Albanese, recently plunged himself into an embarrassing situation that will probably stain his reputation permanently (see the Daily Mail's coverage here). He delivered a speech in which one passage, a piece of nicely honed rhetoric about the leader of the opposition (the Liberal party), was lifted with […]
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I've pretty much given up criticizing the BBC's reporting on science and technology, since this is Language Log, not BBC-Science-Reporting-Is-Broken Log, and documenting every breathless misunderstanding or credulous reprint of a misleading public-relations handout would take more time than I have available for blogging. So for the past few years, I've examined an occasional bit […]
Following up on my post "Counterfeit cultural capital" (5/11/2011), David Russinoff sent some additional information about the early history of expressions like "angles comprised of equal right lines" in English translations of Euclid. I reproduce his note in full below, in order to make his efforts available to other interested scholars, while adding a warning […]
Was this inspired by this? Or is it a case of anticipatory plagiarism?
According to Ellie Levitt, "Psychiatry chairman faces ghostwriting accusations", The Daily Pennsylvanian 12/2/2010: Recently discovered e-mails reveal that a document published in 2003 by Psychiatry Department Chairman Dwight Evans may not have been honest work. Project on Government Oversight — a nonpartisan watchdog organization that unearths corruption and promotes an ethical federal government — posted […]
In a modest way, I collect N-to-V conversions in English morphology, via zero derivation, -ize/-ise, -ify, and -ic-ate (brief discussion here). (My colleague Beth Levin has a much larger and better organized collection.) Some of these are long-established, and not particularly transparent semantically, but all of the patterns can be used to innovate verbs — […]
For those of us in the unpleasant position of policing student essays for plagiarism, there's a familiar odor wafting off of the unfolding scandal involving Scott McGinnis, a former congressman and current candidate for governor in Colorado ("McInnis’ water writings mirror works published years ago by Justice Hobbs", Denver Post 7/12/2010): Portions of essays on […]
A nice nominal-compound crash blossom was spotted by Nicholas Widdows on a BBC News web page: Missing women police find remains Like Missing comma, police decide to hire a grammarian, or Missing his mom, Joe called home? No, wait a minute, this isn't about the police missing womanly company — those first two words are […]
According to David Skinner, "Ain't that the truth", Humanities 30(4), July/August 2009: In 1961 a new edition of an old and esteemed dictionary was released. The publisher courted publicity, noting the great expense ($3.5 million) and amount of work (757 editor years) that went into its making. That would be \$4,623.51 per editor-year, if none […]