I just had a fleeting thought when I looked at msn and saw an interesting status that someone had written. Like in many other situations, my first thought was, "where is that from?"
Quoting movies and television shows is a very commonplace thing, but I long for originality - when I will be able to assume that what someone says is a golden bud of original thought.
I think it also goes the other way. I know I have shied away from saying things because they're not from a reputable source (according to popular culture).
Perhaps I'm taking this too far. It's usually fairly obvious when someone is quoting something in speech. On the internet, the distinction is becoming weaker and weaker : citation is rare, and even quotation marks are appearing less frequently. While this is a grammar issue on its own, it's the citation that bothers me most - not that I am fighting for the rights of the original authors, but by omission, quotation becomes a given and therefore, originality becomes something out of the ordinary.
I wish that originality was a way of life for more of the world.
2 comments:
This reminds me of all the faculty members from college who would look at a student's work and say 'oh this reminds me of such and such.' And I wanted to tell them to go to hell! Yes maybe it looks like something else, but why is it so important? Especially if the creator has never seen anything like it before, than it would be original regardless if someone else had done something similar at another point in time.
I wasn't saying that things remind me of such and such; I was saying that people present things in ways that would make you think that it was an original thought/creation, but it's not. It's basically apathetic plagiarism.
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