Shortcuts; plagiarism

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Brian H. wrote, "if you create a shortcut from a batch (.bat) file that
calls Editor.exe you'll get a .lnk type. Might work in 9x." No, it
doesn't. I run dBase 5 for DOS with a batch file (so as to get into the
right directory in my data drive, so as not to have to go through the
very cumbersome process of changing drives and directories in dBase), and
the shortcut to it is still a pif. What's odd is that my shortcut to
XyWin (which was barely a Windows program by 3.1 standards--it doesn't
scatter bits and pieces of itself all over the system, but keeps its
files in its own folder--and is fiendishly difficult to install under
Win32) is a .lnk. Win 9.x evidently has some way of knowing what apps are
and what aren't 32-bit one, and assigns shortcut types accordingly. And
the choice bit there is that shortcuts to any "Windows" commands (e.g.,
FIND, and even XCOPY32) are .pifs.
	During the 17 years I spent copy editing encyclopedias, I came across a
fair amount of attempted plagiarism. We once engaged a well-known Welsh
novelist to write an article on Wales (dumb thing to do, but...). Having
no idea how to write an encyclopedia article (why would he?), he
proceeded to plagiarize huge chunks of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica one. Then there was the editor whose tortured sentence I
transformed into idiomatic English, only to be told, "But then it's word
for word what's in [another encyclopedia]." I had to explain that if
you're writing about someone born in 1892, and you write, "Joe Zilch was
born in 1892," you're not plagiarizing, even if five other authors have
written that sentence, because there's really no other way to say that in
English. You certainly shouldn't twist it into "Born was in 1892 Joe
Zilch," or any other outrage on idiom and syntax.
	As for "parallel creations," this happens in folklore and preliterate
cultures, to the consternation of anthropologists. I believe the Inuit
have a story quite similar to that of Androcles and the Lion (hunter
helps large predator in a pickle, predator later spares hunter under
dramatic circumstances), with the Lion's part played by a polar bear. Is
this a pre-Adamite story handed down with variations to suit the local
fauna over the millennia? collective subconscious? independent parallel
creation? evidence of ancient Roman penetration of the Arctic? Go figure.
	Ecclesiastes as a model for Tale of Two Cities, opening? Well,
perhaps: there's a certain similarity of structure, esp. at the
beginning, but the rhythm is so different (and Dickens was written to be
read aloud, like much of the Bible) that I should hardly have thought of
the former in conjunction with the latter. If your really want a case of
deliberate and playfull borrowing, compare the dialogue between Becket
and the tempter in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral ("Thomas: Whose
was it?/Tempter: His who is gone./ Thomas: Who shall have it? /Tempter:
He who will come..." (p. 186 in Complete Poems and Plays,
1909-1950, Harcourt, 1971) with the "ritual" in Conan Doyle's "The
Musgrave Ritual": "Whose was it? "His who is gone." "Who shall have
it?"
"He who will come."...). Eliot appears to have delighted in that sort of
thing. He borrowed a very unusual meter from Kipling for one of the Old
Possum poems: cf. "Skimbleshanks, The Railway Cat," which begins
something like this: "There's a whisper down the line at eleven
thrity-nine,/ when the train's standing ready to depart" (quoted from
memory, because I cannot lay my hands on Old Possum right now);
and Kipling's "The Long Trail," which begins, "There's a whisper down the
field where the year has shot her yield, /And the ricks stand grey to the
sun..."). I cannot recall another poem in English to use that meter and
rhyme scheme.
	Musical borrowings are more complex. I do know that two hymn tunes have
very similar beginnings, though the ends of the verses diverge: compare
Irby ("Once in Royal David's City," #236 in the 1943 ed. of the Episcopal
Hymnal) and Cwm Rhondda (which should be in any Methodist hymnal; Harry
Emerson Fosdick's "God of Grace and God of Glory" is one text sung to
it). And of course there's the great controversy over the old Austrian
Imperial Anthem (now a hymn tune called Austria, and also the tune of
"Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles"), a symphony by Hyden, and an
Austrian folktune that may be the source of, or derived from, either or
both or neither.
Patricia