"Plagiarism" has the ugly look of a word far from home. The dictionaries concur. Its origin, they say, is the Greek plagios, meaning crooked or treacherous, from which comes the Latin plagium, a kidnapper, a plunderer (of another's slaves). From there, the flying carpet of metaphor brought it to its present residence in literature and science, where, as plagiarism, it is a word to conjure with.

Consider, for example, Stephen B. Oates, biographer. Last year, Stewart and Feder, famous (or infamous) for earlier work on fraud in science, used a computer to identify more than five hundred instances of "plagiarism" in Oates' books on Abraham Lincoln, William Faulkner, and Martin Luther King. The instances are not chapters, paragraphs, or even long sentences, but (mostly) short passages, sweet turns of phrase. Is Oates guilty of plagiarism? While denying he is, Oates admits (Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 May 1993): "There is no way I can seem to find to defend myself." Perhaps he should have consulted one of our contributors.

In this Perspectives, K. R. St. Onge, himself the author of a book on literary plagiarism, argues that the smallest unit of plagiarism should be the sentence, not the phrase. The re-use of phrases is, he argues, virtually unavoidable-and harmless.

While Oates should find St. Onge's definition reassuring, I do not. Even by its conservative standard, I am a plagiarist. In eighth grade, I did a report on the battle of Gettysburg. The ten-page report, which I typed myself, came (as verbatim as I could manage) from one chapter of an old history of the civil war my parents had around the house. I tried to cover my tracks, as any smart eighth-grader would, by appending a list of "Sources" including that book (along with the Encyclopedia Britannica and a few titles from the card catalog).

There is more irony than shame in this story. My youthful crime earned only a B-. (My typing wasn't good; my proof reading, worse; and, apparently, such things counted more than substance.) A teacher myself now, I wonder what my American History teacher was thinking. Surely she could tell the difference between the writing of an average eighth-grader, barely able to keep subject and verb together, and the long, smooth-Bowing paragraphs of an accomplished historian. Yet, she said nothing-and (here's the irony), with that, I began a life of (more or less) honest writing. Did she handle my plagiarism properly (assuming she recognized it)?

Linda Bergman has a surprisingly complicated answer to that question, though one focusing on first-year college students rather than eighth-graders. Plagiarism is, she argues, very much a matter of context. What is common knowledge in one context may require a footnote in another; what is free for the taking in one context is theft in another.

Richard Matasar makes much the same point in his piece, though his examples come from the study or practice of law, where we might expect the rights of authorship to be honored relentlessly.
The conclusion to draw from these three pieces seems to be that plagiarism is not a simple idea. In some contexts, plagiarism is literally theft, the unauthorized taking of intellectual property (a violation of copyright). Much literary plagiarism is precisely that, the creation of a commercially valuable work by plundering huge chunks of an older work, adding nothing of value.

Literary plagiarism also generally involves deception, both of the publisher and of readers. But the deception compounds the offense without changing it. Literary plagiarism would still be plagiarism if the publisher knew all along that the work had been copied and even if readers could tell at a glance. The new work would still make the right to copy the old less valuable.

In another context, however, deception is intrinsic to plagiarism. Academic plagiarism claims undue credit. So. for example, students who buy term papers from their local "Dr. Research" do not violate copyright by submitting his papers as their own. He sold them the copyright. They are, nonetheless, guilty of (academic) plagiarism because they are claiming credit for his work when the credit is supposed to go to the work's creator, not its owner. The nub of academic plagiarism is deception: these plagiarists cannot receive the credit they seek if the reader knows the work's origin.

Context may explain why much that looks like plagiarism generally passes without complaint. In government and business, for example, a senior executive may give a speech having one or more unacknowledged "ghosts" as author. No one cries, "Plagiarism:" The executive is a "spokesperson", not an individual; she will have to take responsibility for what she says, but the only personal credit she can expect for her words is for their delivery.

If contexts were as distinct in practice as I just made them seem, plagiarism might be much less topical than it is. In practice, however, contexts overlap and, worse, seem to shift unpredictably, much as do the Mississippi's shipping channels.

Donald Buzzelli of the National Science Foundation concludes this issue of Perspectives by giving an example of such a shift. NSF has adopted new regulations concerning plagiarism. These include the obvious prohibitions, for example, against reviewers taking (without permission) ideas from the proposals they review. (What might St. Onge say about that prohibition? What might Buzzelli respond?)

But the new regulations also include at least one that is not obvious: Each proposal submitted to NSF must now certify that "the text and graphics. . ., unless otherwise indicated, are the original work of the signatories or individuals working under their supervision." Gone are the days when "boilerplate" freely moved from one proposal to another. Now would-be principal investigators must give credit in the proposal to some who, until recently, had never supposed credit due there. Plagiarism's flying carpet is airborne again.

That may explain why the Office of Research Integrity of the National Institutes of Health and the American Association for the Advancement of Science recently sponsored a two-day conference on "Plagiarism and Theft of Ideas:" Now is a good time to think about plagiarism.