Dolley Madison and Maureen Dowd

We were having dinner with some friends on Saturday night and I was enjoying the company of a bright 5-year-old who sat to my right at the dinner table and held forth with me on the topics of his selection, namely, the war that won’t end, Dolley Madison, and Hotel for Dogs. When he mentioned Madagascar 2, I said I thought the plot was a little too similar to The Lion King. I told him I felt like I was back with Scar and the hyenas all over again. Because the boy is an accomplished writer, who had shown me several books before dinner that he had written on first grade paper, I introduced him to the word plagiarism.

Plagiarism. Well first, he wanted to spell it. You know the schools are really creating brave spellers these days because now there is a theory called something like experimental spelling in usage in the Chapel Hill Carrboro City Schools whereby students are not penalized for using a word that they cannot spell correctly in their writing. Thinking back to my days of typing term papers at Sacred Heart Academy on a typewriter, I wish this educational coup would have occurred decades earlier.

So the experimental speller gave it a crack: P-L-A-Y-G-E-R and so on. This spelling makes plagiarism seem like child’s play. A quick check on Webster’s online says that the word is from the Latin word for kidnapper.

And the taking of the idea must be willful. I made that point very clear at the table.

Did Maureen Dowd willfully take from another and fail to credit him in her NYT column? I personally find it doubtful. According to an AP article I read this morning, she told the Huffington Post that the material she wrote was an acoustic memory. She did not use my term acoustic memory. That might have gotten my goat. She did say it was something she heard and then wrote. The AP article does not go on to say if she intended to credit the speaker or if she didn’t feel it was necessary.

I am such the idea purist that I do fault people who steal others' ideas. But what under the sun is new today? Still I think there is a line that does get crossed too often. Having been around many writers in the past five years or so, I once witnessed a writer discussing a topic at a coffee and then saw a very near exact quote of his concept in another writer’s work, uncredited, the very next day by a writer who was at our table.

But what of aging brains and acoustic memories during the creative process? For example, have I heard someone posit this question and failed to credit him? Does Maureen Dowd sometimes forget she did not create an idea and then fail to credit it? At my age it would be plausible. My son constantly tells me that I forget because I am OLD. His caps. His emphasis. There, I gave credit.