But wait, you might ask, don’t people accidentally repeat each other’s sentences all the time? It seems to me that this should not be unusual. Yet try plugging that last sentence word by word into Google Book Search, and watch what happens.
It: Rejected–too many hits to count
It seems: 11,160,000 matches
It seems to: 3,050,000
It seems to me: 1,580,000
It seems to me that: 844,000
It seems to me that this: 29,700
It seems to me that this should: 237
It seems to me that this should not: 20
It seems to me that this should not be: 9
It seems to me that this should not be unusual: 0It seems to me that this should not be unusual is itself … unusual. —Paul Collins —Dead Plagiarists Society (Slate)
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Thanks for the season's greetings, Mike.
P.S. I put quotation marks around the phrase in question, and all the hits I found were to references to the article Collins wrote... oddly enough, none of the hits were to Slate's site -- at the moment all the hits are to blogs who have excerpted that passage.
Google Books still offends me as a creative writer who would like to maintain some semblance of intellectual property for the syrup that ostensibly has been tapped and bottled straight from the maple tree of his own brain. I saw a panel discussion on CSPAN BOOKTV a few weeks ago about Google Books' attempt to create the ultimate online library and I'm even more troubled by the wanton archiving they are doing in the name of building a digital archive. Sure, to use it to uncover literary crimes by so-called "original" authors (just as teachers do with students)...that's pretty ingenious. And the archiving of INFORMATION does serve the public good. But what google is doing to the LITERARY CONTENT of books is probably a literary crime in itself -- for copying for profit is as bad if not worse than plagiarism....but let's not go there. After all, it's Xmas eve.
On topic, however, I think Collins' article would be even more fascinating if he'd used google proper, not google books, to test his hypothesis. For when you put Collins' double-negative Tom Jones' inspired phrasology into google proper (not just book search), you get:
23.1 MILLION RESULTS!!!
That doesn't make Paul Collins a plagiarist. Just a trickster with statistics. After all, his test phrase didn't appear in his own book, but in an online article.
Anywho, I was just dropping by to say Merry Xmas!
-- Mike Arnzen