Every word you will read in this post (and almost every word in my entire blog) has been written before. Not one of these words was invented by me. But if I put words together in a certain order, then they can be said to be a "unique phrase" and if someone else uses it, they are supposed to give credit to me. (At least I think they are....)

"Heh. Indeed." will serve as an easily recognized example in the blogosphere.

This can arise in a variety of ways. My friend Justin Case noticed the other day that, deliberately or not, I used what some would consider Lenin's famous "unique phrase" "What is to be done?" in my remark about Christians behaving as Communists.

Should I have credited Lenin? I thought this was cute, and that maybe some people would notice it, and maybe some wouldn't.

To my mind, that insolence was what made it cute!

It's the way I write, damn it, and if it's infringement, if it's plagiarism, then I guess I am a plagiarist! There is a chameleon aspect to my writing; I soak up philosophies and writing styles that I like, and I also soak up philosophies and writing styles that I hate! Then, when I start venting, it all just flows....

How can one be a satirist without plagiarizing the culture that one satirizes?

Several months ago, the proprietor of the dumbdumberdubya.com web site complained when I used the phrase "dumb, dumber, dubya" and asked where I had first seen it. I wasn't aware of having seen it anywhere (I sure as hell never visited his web site!), and I meant to satirize a certain mindset off the top of my head. From what I can see, the phrase was first used on the Internet on April 23, 2001, but I wonder whether or not that was the first. In all candor, I was unaware of ever having seen the phrase anywhere when I made fun of it.

There can be such a thing as simultaneous invention. This happens frequently in patent law, because inventors often think along similar lines, and so the rule becomes one of "first to file." It wouldn't matter if I invented something last year; if you file now, you get the patent. "Publish or perish?" Who said that first? (I DON'T KNOW AND I DON'T CARE!)

A few months ago, I jokingly accused the Washington Times of plagiarizing "my" phrase "Hurricane Hillary" -- because they used it a day after I had. But then I saw that it had appeared on the Internet over the years, dozens of times. Plus, there really was a "Hurricane Hillary" (not involving Hillary Clinton, apparently.)

Do I really care?

No.

And that may be a problem.

I refuse to spend my time worrying about phraseology to the point where I have to google every expression I might utter in case somewhere, someone else used the same words in that same order before!

I would rather stop blogging now.

But what is the rule? I like to think that if someone feels aggrieved by an allegedly borrowed expression or phrase, then he should point it out. I would certainly give credit. But I cannot spend all my time searching while I am writing to see whether someone said the same thing or had the same idea at some point in time. There are too many people, too many words, too many ideas, and more and more all the time.

Worse yet, not everything makes it into the Internet. These ideas I have -- about everything to the fall of Rome and early Christianity, to homosexual marriage, masturbation, drug use, Howard Dean, popular culture -- they are my ideas but many, many people have thought about the same things and many people could have had identical ideas and possibly written them down. I can't help that -- and all I can do is state again that I try to keep this blog accurate and as fair as I can. If anyone thinks something I have written was written somewhere else, please tell me, and I will point that out.

I'll even point it out LOUDLY!

Not only doesn't it bother me at all, I am always delighted to see others thinking along similar lines.

And if that isn't good enough, I guess I'll just have to pack my prophylactics with peanuts!

Hope that wasn't plagiarism!

(VERY OLD) UPDATE: Did Thomas Jefferson, by borrowing heavily from guys like Locke and Hume, commit plagiarism? Amazingly, I thought that was my own original question, but now I see that it has been asked before:

"Jefferson's work clearly was not entirely original. In fact, similar ideas had been expressed by numerous natural law philosophers such as John Locke, David Hume, and Jean Jacques Rousseau." Hutchinson pointed out that the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is almost taken verbatim from a previous work of John Locke. "Our readers expect originality and not just recycled old matrerial," stated Hutchinson.

Adding to the accusations was that, while Jefferson's column started off with "All men are created equal," Jefferson had circulated an earlier version to 56 of his friends (including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams) in which Jefferson himself admitted that the ideas in his column were "self-evident." Jefferson apologized for not stating that explicitly in the introduction to the column which he cut down for space. He offered to issue an admission that the ideas he had were not uniquely his but were self-evident and had been previously circulated by many other "natural law" philosophers.

The problem with my low standards is that I think the promotion of ideas is the important thing -- certainly more important than worrying about who had which idea first. I would not be annoyed if someone plagiarized stuff in my blog, because at least the ideas would be getting around, and I consider the ideas more important than my ego.

Things are getting to the point where there's no such thing as an original idea! (And that's not an original idea.)

Not that I ran out of original ideas -- but I hope readers will see my point.