[Nancy, November 12, 2021.]
It’s “a famous quote” that circulates online and off, attributed to the sociologist Robert K. Merton:
Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.A source? There never is one. In Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998), for instance, Anne Fadiman quotes this sentence, attributes it to Merton, and adds
I am unable to provide a citation because my source is a yellow Post-it handed to me by my brother in Captiva, Florida, in November 1996.Merton comes close to the words “anticipatory plagiarism” in On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript (1965), which looks into the history of the aphorism “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Here’s Merton:
Newton then makes a profoundly sociological observation about the behavior of men in general and by implication, the behavior of men of science in particular, that, until this moment, I had thought I was the first to have made. That anticipatory plagiarist, Newton, follows the sentences I have just quoted from his letter with this penetrating observation— and so on. Notice that there’s nothing here of a definition. Merton is making a quick joke: he had a thought, but Newton had it first, dammit.
And Winston Churchill had “anticipatory plagiarism” first, or at least before Merton. Here’s Churchill, May 19, 1927, with a remark collected in The Definitive Wit of Winston Churchill (2009) and elsewhere. Churchill was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, addressing the House of Commons:
Mr Lowe seems to have been walking over my footsteps before I had trodden them, because he said, trying to explain what had occurred to the satisfaction of a very strict House in those days: “And so each year will take money from its successor, and this process may go till the end of time, although how it will be settled when the world comes to an end I am at a loss to know.” It was unconscious anticipatory plagiarism.The weird thing: I recently mentioned anticipatory plagiarism in an e-mail to a friend, tried to recall the source, looked it up, and found Robert K. Merton. But had I remembered a 2013 Orange Crate Art post about cupcakes and handwriting, I would have had it right. And if I had not read Nancy this morning, I would not have thought to write this post.
[Lowe: Robert Lowe.]
comments: 4
In the design and type world, there's a well-known quote from Frederic Goudy, who jokingly said, "All the old fellows stole our best ideas." I wonder now where it's attributed. Will try to find out.
That’s a good one. Happy hunting!
Well, it sounds like the proper quote is actually "The old fellows stole all of our best ideas." According to Canadian type designer Nick Shinn, Goudy "used it as a couple of lines of text, beneath most of the full character showings in a self-penned monograph The Typophiles Chap Books XIII and XIV, A Half-Century of Type Design and Typography, published in 1945." https://typedrawers.com/discussion/4235/all-the-old-fellows-stole-our-best-ideas-source#latest
Graphic design chronicler Steven Heller says, in his book Borrowed Design, that Goudy "uttered" the words around 1915, but he doesn't say where.
It’s exciting to know that there’s an identifiable source. And if he said it in 1915, he had the idea (with different phrasing) before Churchill (not to mention Merton and Sluggo).
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