Plagiarism! Eeek!

Look. I know plagiarism is a naughty, naughty thing to do. I used to do it all the time myself. But then I was a speech writer.

Maybe I just wrote speeches for the wrong people - quite a few wrong people, in fact - but where I come from speeches were "works for hire," meaning the rights to the speeches didn't wind up belonging to me, they belonged to the speaker. I know of at least one book about a former client of mine in which virtually every quote comes directly from a speech I wrote, because the subject of the book just turned over a stack of old speeches to the writer and told him to use whatever he wanted of them. So what? That was the deal, and the check cleared.

True, I never intentionally took stuff I'd written for one person and put it in another person's speech, but that was mostly because the other person usually came with his own stack of former speeches to crib from and that was all I needed, and which I did with abandon because in speech writing repeating certain phrases and revisiting certain ideas from speech to speech is a good thing, not bad. That's how slogans are born. And sound bites. Not to mention clichés. (And it's also true certain people - including speech writers, would be my guess - tend to be natural mimics and to repeat the things they hear.)

Anyway, I always thought of plagiarism as sort of an academic concept, for academics, who seem to be horrified by the idea. Which is probably a good thing. It's no fair to simply pass off somebody else's work as your own. I suppose what saved me from that was the general conviction that anything anybody else wrote was lame (a conviction I have more or less given up on at long last) and - I'm just grabbing at straws here - some smidgen of pride in my own work. In other words, not much.

So I am a good deal less than whelmed by all the jabbering about Obama's, and likely to remain so until I hear people being accused of plagiarism for saying "I have a dream" or "no more taxes" or...wait for it..."read my lips."

(And by the way, as long as I'm confessing here, that's also why I tend to use way too many commas when I write. I hear them as pauses in speech, not as grammatical artifacts, and I use them much too often and often in places they don't belong. It's also why I'm sometimes overly casual about spelling. Nobody knows how you spelled a word when all they do is hear it. In fact, in speech writing, sometimes spelling works against you. I once wrote for a guy who insisted on pronouncing "chic" as "chick." I gave up trying to correct it and wrote "sheek" on the teleprompter. Worked fine.)