But we have become a Cut-and-Paste Nation.

There was a college kid in the bar once who got kicked out of the University for plagiarism. He said he cut-and-pasted something from Wikipedia into a paper, then forget to credit the reference. Not sure if it was a phrase, a paragraph, the whole Wikipedia page -- he didn't specify: just cut-and-paste.

Maybe the University was right in its action. But maybe he just found the thought he wanted to say, and thought it generic enough to be okay. It probably wasn't scintillating prose. Probably pretty voice-neutral. Teaching one to cover one's ass when using words isn't a bad thing to learn, but -- if the wording had been properly reworded -- was the paper any good? Are medical techniques OK that were plagiarized from Nazi doctors? Maybe not a great comparison, sure.

But we have become a Cut-and-Paste Nation. The bovine creature no longer resides in the farm dwelling. Put as such so I don't plagiarize 'the cow has left the barn'.

We read something we like, we cut-and-paste it to our social media. We cut-and-paste quotes, anecdotes, recipes, memes. We cut-and-paste movie dialogue into our conversations, we cut-and-paste our politics, our beliefs, our identity. Imitation is no longer the sincerest form of flattery, plagiarism is.

 He was at the bar for a few days, regrouping from his setback. Then he went back home to whatever city that home was. Hopefully he was able to enroll in another college. Someone once said something about second chances, but I don't want to state it word-for-word.


- james james

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