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Word Ways

Abstract

I've always regarded my work as so extreme and idiosyncratic that, if only to define its integrity, it resisted plagiarism. In fact, little has proved my assumption wrong. Some 35 years ago, a Columbia professor doing an anthology of short fiction presented ideas that looked suspiciously familiar, even though mine hadn't yet been published. I thought the prof might have gotten them from a manuscript submitted to a magazine of which he was a junior editor. Since the prof was more than ten years my senior, while I was 25, I had a problem confronting him. I recall writing a polite letter that went unanswered. I remember asking a mutual acquaintance, a junior professor between us in age, to try my name on him, but I don't remember any results from him research. My assumption now is that the junior prof was doing what comes naturally to those in his academic classes-pilfering form their social inferiors without acknowledgement.

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