On Proper Citation

Check Yo Source Befo’ You Wreck Yo Source*

 

This morning I saw a cute little chain-poem floating around my Facebook news feed. It’s a sweet little number on the importance of nurses. And it’s also true; nurses are rather important people. Here’s the poem as I read it:

About NURSES:
Somebody asked: "You're a nurse?!? That's cool, I wanted to do that when I was a kid. How much do you make?"
The nurse replied: "HOW MUCH DO I MAKE?" ...
I can make holding your hand seem like the most important thing in the world when you're scared...
I can make your child breathe when they stop...
I can help your father survive a heart attack...
I can make myself get up at 5AM to make sure your mother has the medicine she needs to live...
I work all day to save the lives of strangers...
I make my family wait for dinner until I know your family member is taken care of...
I make myself skip lunch so that I can make sure that everything I did for your wife today is charted...
I make myself work weekends and holidays because people don't just get sick Monday thru Friday.
Today, I might save your life.
How much do I make?
All I know is, I make a difference.
Repost not only if you are a nurse or you love a nurse, but most importantly, repost this if you respect their work!!

 

See, isn’t that nice? Now, for those of you who know me, or at least have literacy skills somewhere in the realm of “observant,” you have probably figured out that there’s a problem here: this isn’t an original work; at best, it’s a mimic and at worst it’s plagiarism.

No, I’m not a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Shut up. Go read the poem again.

Done? Good. Now watch this Taylor Mali video:

 

Notice the repetition of the phrase “I make…” all the way through to the end. This repetition is really the only case I can make for the above poem being a mimic. It fails in every other aspect of mimicry: in particular length and tone.

Ah, tone. Listen to Mali. He’s an unmitigated fireball exploding on that stage. That is nothing but pure passion for what he is saying. Whereas the nurse version, outside of a moment of “Z0MG AWL CAPZ!?Interrobang!!?” lacks that passion. It’s sweet. It’s nice. However, it lacks passion. 

To take this further, this poem doesn’t work as a mimic because absolutely nowhere is there any reference to the original work. Someone somewhere tried to pass that cutesy thing off as their own work. “But what if it was submitted anonymously?” you may be asking or I may just be prepping a response to such an argument. Well, to that I say someone cowardly tried to pass off that poem as an original work.

The truth is, plagiarism is never cool. Passing off work as your own and/or not attributing works to their proper sources is the sort of thing that makes baby kitties cry. Do you want to make baby kitties cry? Do you, you monster? If you said no, then you’re a good person and should probably maybe not pass off other peoples’ works anymore, ok? If you said yes, then you should seek help. Maybe talk to Dr. Phil.   

 

*I toyed with a few different subtitles for this post. These deserve honorable mention:

• Every Time You Plagiarize, God Green Lights a Michael Bay Movie
• Just Because It’s Cute Doesn’t Make It Yours
• How Basic Google Searching Can Get You In Trouble (Sans Sex)
• Public Domain Doesn’t Mean What You Think it Does
• That’s Not Yours. Put It Down
  

Pedantry Does Not Make You an Authority

First of all, I’m going to get this out of the way up front. I fully understand the irony in me complaining about other people being pedantic. It’s as absurd as William Shatner complaining about hammy acting.

Earlier today I read a blog post someone linked on Facebook regarding someone’s top ten list of misused words. If you know me at all, you probably think this is something I could get behind. Up until this morning, I would have agreed with you. The author of this piece seems to think of “misused words” as any word used outside of its original definition. The problem with this view is that it completely ignores one of the beautiful things about language: it evolves.

Words do, in fact, change meaning over time. A word is defined by its common usage amongst the majority of the population. The purpose of language is to clearly communicate some meaning. Stephen Fry said it best: “There is no doubt what ‘five items or less’ means…”  The fight for clarity becomes moot when ideas conveyed are readily understood.

I’m not saying that there should be no standards in word usage. A person can’t say “I literally dropped water in my diaper” and expect to have people understand that what the person means is “I was completely scared.” There’s no reasonable correlation there. However, this is because most people would still agree that “literally” does not mean “figuratively”; also, nobody is going to understand what the phrase “dropped water in my diaper” is even supposed to mean. I wrote the damn sentence and I’m not even sure exactly what it means.

All I’m saying is that it strikes me as pompous and priggish to claim a word can only ever maintain its root usage. Claiming that words are being used wrong simply because they are not being used in their original sense robs the English language of something beautiful. Of course, I could always stop overanalyzing what someone on the internet posted on his blog.

___

While I get over my pot-kettle-black problem above, why don’t you tell me what words you think are getting misused and abused.

The Best in the Biz.

Howdy, Scribblings.

So, things have been a bit dour around this here blog of late. Very serious business going on. I'm going to take a brief break from that to bring you something near and dear to me: grammar!

First of all this is a fantastic grammar blog. I enjoy reading this immensely because it gives helpful tips on word forms (how many adjectives can you string together?) as well as interesting words you'd never hear otherwise (Verdurous is an amazing word). Give it a look. It's run by the fantastic people over at OWL.

The OWL website is a fantastic resource for writing tips, current MLA and APA style guides, ESL teaching tips, and even provides links to open writing jobs. If you're a professional writer, a student, or just a hobbyist, these sites are fantastic.

And since I'm plugging things today, I'd also like to add this:

My friend Meghan is an avid reader. She's practically rabid about it. She would love to recommend books for you to read, and she does just that. All you have to do is pop over to her new site, Ask Parliament Books and read some stellar book reviews by this delightfully loquacious bibliophile.