It is all too apparent that one scholar's "fair use" is another scholar's plagiarism. If this were not true, neither the scholarly press nor the general press would have so much spirited fratricide to report. Almost everyone enjoys a good fight, especially among intellectual heavyweights. For the accused, it is a battle to almost certain academic death; for the accusers, soul-satisfying gratification in protecting "academic integrity" and shielding valid, significant, and original scholarship from fraud. For some academics, plagiarism has become a fair substitute for pugilism.

About the only thing the opponents can agree on is that the motivating epithet, plagiarism, refers to concepts and acts that lead to consequences. Regrettably, the consequences often reflect badly on both sides, a very high price to pay for scholars presumably committed to intellectual precision. Unless it harbors some strange compulsion to appear foolish, the academy ought to declare a moratorium on plagiarism charges until it can reach some consensus concerning what the pathology is and where it starts.

The idea of plagiarism was to stop some individuals from copying the works of others. That idea was so persuasive that it is now invoked to stop individuals from using the words of others. Authors produce works of various lengths and qualities, and having worked hard, they want credit-due and rightly so. The works were clearly theirs, but what of the words in the works? Are they also protected by the proper sanctions of plagiarism? The late Alexander Lindey, who in Plagiarism and Originality, reviews most carefully the legal and moral equities of authorship, said: “A dozen paragraphs taken from a long book may be fair use; four lines from a six-line poem may be an infringement. The question is whether or not the borrower has unreasonably taken advantage of the creative effort of his predecessor.”

Lindey is an authoritative place to start. Most definitions of plagiarism, such as those of the Modern Language Association, derive directly or indirectly, at least in the modern era, from his, which follows (including the often omitted third sentence): "Plagiarism is literary-or artistic or musical-theft. It is the false assumption of authorship: the wrongful act of taking the product of another person's mind, and presenting it as one's own. Copying someone else's story or play or song, intact or with inconsequential changes, and adding one's name to the result constitutes a simple illustration of plagiarism.”
If the academy would remember this, it could save itself a lot of pain. If taken seriously, Lindey's definition would silence about ninety percent of all plagiarism charges. Lindey is not concerned with petty verbal borrowings.

Lindey was obviously on the right course. Who would not want to protect new validities, new significant hypotheses and findings, and generally, original scholarship of whatever epoch? But eventually, we must ask, how far do we go?-and what moves imperceptibly with time into the "public domain"? Ideas, images, events, circumstances, vocabulary, all move in concert. At some minimal level between the vocabulary of tens of thousands of words that belongs to all native speakers of a language and excerpts of the syntax of an author, plagiarism has to start. Is there a natural cleavage between vocabulary and syntax?

Any scholar who confronts the plagiarism challenge should consider the fundamental elements of syntax, phrases and sentences, and their statistical realities. The phrase is clearly the fundamental unit of syntax as the word is the fundamental unit of vocabulary. Phrases typically come in sets of a few related words, rarely more than seven or eight. Longer phrases can be built, but usually serve no expositional purpose. Given the very limited syntactical lengths of phrases, when authors write on the same topic, the longer the text, the higher the probability of some correspondence between phrases in the two texts. If the two manuscripts are extensive, the presence of some common phrases approaches certainty. Historical scholarship, for example, draws on common imagery, associations, events, and circumstances of the past and on common sources. Scholars imbued with their subject, threading through the intricacies of complex chronologies, do not usually conceptualize in phrases. They may go back and tidy up some syntax, but their writings must work with ideas and concepts, the medium of which is the sentence.

How does the sentence differ from the phrase? Give credit to our hardworking English teachers who drilled in the notion that the sentence is, or should be, a complete idea. It is also a special, indeed, a very special species of the phrase. But so critical to syntactical powers was this special phrase that it became the sentence. The sentence completely unfettered expositional powers. The prepositional sentence was born: 15, 20, 30, 50 words of absolutely unique syntax. We can forget for a moment whether sentences of such length are true or significant. We cannot forget that they are absolutely original. The statistical probabilities of two sentences of the lengths above occurring verbatim in two different texts is so infinitesimal that it can be treated as zero.

Hence, as phrases in exposition are extended, the probability of some correspondence approaches certainty; in sentences, the probability virtually vanishes. Technically, the sentence could be infinite. The third sentence in Faulkner's historical novel, The Unvanquished, has 104 words. If someone copies that sentence and offers it as original composition, that's plagiarism beyond all cavil. Let the statisticians play with the factorial permutations of 104 words. Let scholars contemplate the yawning gulf that separates the phrase from the sentence in the expositional process. Then look to Lindey for firm guidance.

If we expect to be recognized for each phrase, jot and tittle, we are being parsimonious with the higher lexical endowment providence has granted to some and not to others. Nor should we be too jealous of the products of an innate neural system that favors some and not others verbally. There is enough greatness of soul in the academy not to be troubled by low-level phrasal borrowings. It would not have troubled Lindey and it should not trouble us. It might be courteous to acknowledge "apt phrases;' but only in the Wild West were people shot for bad manners. The sentence is the minimal unit of syntax that, if potent enough, true, and original, might merit protection. Lindey also said, "There is too much plagiarism crying:" And that was forty years ago. At the rate we are going now, plagiarism zealots will have individual words under copyright in far less time than that.

There is yet another threshold of concern in plagiarism: ideas. They arise in neural-symbolic processing as precursors to words, phrases, and longer formulations. The plagiarism of ideas invites extended treatment but can be resolved here with perhaps surprising dispatch if not with conclusive persuasiveness. Ideas have no existence apart from the symbolic forms in which they present themselves to us as symbols: words, formulas, logos, motifs, and the like, for which the traditional rules of appropriate attribution properly apply. Ideas, as such, are beyond protection. It is difficult enough to protect the protectable.