Mizner’s Law of Research
If you steal from one author it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many it’s research.
Wilson Mizner, writer, restaurateur (part owner of the Brown Derby in Hollywood), gambler, miner, prizefighter, con man, and all-round wit, may actually have delivered some of the lines attributed to him. (This one is credited to him in John Burke’s Rogue’s Progress 1975) For other reputed Mizner-isms see Barnum’s Law and Cheshire’s Law of the Social Jungle.
Most writers, even the greatest, follow Mizner’s Law religiously. Thus, discussing the formulaic expressions (e.g. ‘wine-dark sea’) employed by Homer and other minstrels, Dr. Robert E. D. Cattley, a former classics professor at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, cited “the old principle that ‘He writeth best who stealeth best all things both great and small, for the great mind that used them first from nature stole them all’” (New York Times, December 20th 1983). Or, as the Reverend Joseph E. Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said concerning allegations that Martin Luther King had plagiarised parts of his doctoral dissertation: “Preachers have an old saying. The first time they use somebody else’s work they give credit. The second time they say some thinker said it. The third time they just say it” (New York Times, November 10th, 1990). Seneca, writing in the first century A.D. and well before authors and publishers dreamed up the concept of copyright, was of much the same opinion noting in one of his Moral Essays: “Whatever is well said by anyone is mine.”
For particular examples of great poets who have lifted lines from the works of other - ’sampled’ in the vernacular of modern rap musicians - see Eliot’s Observation.
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