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Wednesday: April 30, 2008

Plagiarism or Allusion?

Filed under: — site admin @ 12:27 AM GMT-0500

Karl at Protein Wisdom quotes North Carolina governor Mike Easley as saying that “Clinton” (Hillary, not Bill, I presume) “makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy”. No one seems to have noticed that he appears to have stolen the idea from an aphorism of the late Frank Rizzo, two-term mayor of Philadelphia: “I’m gonna come on so strong I’ll make Attila the Hun look like a faggot”. Perhaps it’s an allusion or inadvertent reminiscence rather than conscious plagiarism: Rocky and Rizzo make for a double connection to Philadelphia. Either way, I suppose you have to be a Democrat to get away with this kind of thing.

Just Whom Does She Think She Is?

Filed under: — site admin @ 12:02 AM GMT-0500

On Pajamasmedia, Roger Kimball quotes a letter from a professor to her (former) students, threatening to sue them for poor course evaluations. Although he inserts one ‘SIC’ (why the capitalization?) in the second sentence of her letter, it really needs two:

I regret to inform you that I am pursuing a lawsuit in which I am accusing some of you (whom shall go unmentioned in this email) of violating Title VII of anti-federal [SIC] discrimination laws.

Neither Kimball nor nor any of his 6 commenters (as I write) nor any of the 43 commenters on the original Dartlog post notes the gross misuse of the relative pronoun: ‘whom’ should of course be ‘who’. An odd error for someone who “taught writing this year at Dartmouth College”.