The first American book on photography re-touched an English book, Photographic Manipulation. Sermons on honesty were read out from the pulpit by Victorian ministers who had handcopied them from printed books so as to seem to have an original text at hand. A Boston Globe story on the swiping of a commencement address in 1991 was allegedly swiped by The New York Times. Lexicographers responsible for defining plagiarism have been accused of plagiarizing definitions. A University of Oregon booklet plagiarized its section on plagiarism.

Given this compulsion to repeat that which bears on repeating, plagiarism in our culture of the copy appears inevitable. Inevitable, as one famous estimate had it, because the number of different ideas the human mind is capable of is 3,655,760,000, and while there may be a slight hope that all the ideas have not yet been bespoken, there is a high probability of coincidence of unconscious repetition. "As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism!" wrote Mark Twain. "The kernel, the soul -- let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances -- is plagiarism." He was writing to Helen Keller, who herself at the age of twelve had unconsciously (re)written and published as her own a story read aloud to her years before.

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