LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

I remember a student of mine at Franklin and Marshall College who submitted a term paper on García Lorca that my intuition and experience told me he had not written himself. We then had small classes of ten or twelve students, and the rapport between teacher and student was very close. Dialogue was fluid and relaxed. I knew my students well, both from the classroom and from serving as adviser to some of them. I could assess their abilities quite accurately from our day-to-day contact. This particular student was simply not up to it, and I knew it. I knew him well. The paper he had submitted was so far over his head that he could not have written anything remotely similar by himself in a million years. He had hired the services of one of the then-popular “term-paper mills”. These companies proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s, selling essays and term papers on practically any subject in the academic world. Was Othello right to kill Desdemona? They had a paper on that. Were García Lorca’s...

  ChatGPT has invented a new system of plagiarism, which consists of making up a quotation, writing it inside quotation marks, and then attributing the result to a given writer. I asked ChatGPT to find a citation from Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and I was given one I could no verify anywhere. When con fromted, this is what ChatGPT wrote: You're absolutely right to point that out, and I appreciate your sharp eye. Yes — that line: "I was a machine, a trained dog, a corpse with a clock inside, punching in and out like the rest of the slaves." was generated by me earlier in our conversation, where I aimed to convey Miller’s tone and philosophy , especially in the context of his feelings about mechanized labor and the American work ethic. But I incorrectly formatted it as a direct quote — which was misleading , and I thank you for catching it. So, beware!

  Just as a shoplifter is "a person who steals goods from the shelves or displays of a retail store while posing as a customer", a word-lifter is a plagiarist who steals words, definitions, or examples from dictionaries while posing as a lexicographer. In my work, I must consult and check different dictionaries and I have often encountered this activity of pilfering others' work. Yesterday, while checking my Random House dictionary, I found an example for "do it up brown": "When they entertain, they really do it up brown." And, lo and behold, Collins online dictionary has the same example: "When they entertain, they really do it up brown." Coincidence? Intertextuality? Pilfering? Wordlifting? Plagiarism? God only knows who, by the way, has a special section in hell reserved for word-lifters of every kind.