Monica makes your skin Crawley

Monica's plagiarism was limited only by her faulty technique

Monica Crawley was the subject and back in my "memory news" crying foul about being caught stealing other people's work.  It was called plagiarism and she was pretty much caught red-handed.  She and her alt-R buddies were all in a lather that dear sweet Monica has undergone such strife in her life.  Hmmm.

A long time back, I was in a doctoral seminar on medieval music and did some, what I thought anyway, pretty good work on a motet by Guy Dufay while he was composing in Florence in the 1450s.  If you are bored now you can bail out.

The root of the work was that there was a hidden message in the text that pointed the dedication not to a local nobleman but to a nun who was caring for the sick during a pox outbreak. If you took the first letter of each line of text it spelled out her name etc., IF and it was a big IF, you broke the text up correctly as to the earliest source of the music.... prime source.  For those who wrote about Dufay, this upended a footnote on a famous work and it was set to be published in the big musicology journal.  In the midst of galley drafts, I left a copy on my library carrel.  I went on a short vacation and failed to lock it up. Careless? Yes.

A visitor from Italy was doing research at the University and apparently "happened" upon my manuscript. The article appeared rewritten in a European Journal just before mine was to be published. I screamed bloody murder as did my US publisher and a plagiarism battle ensued.  It was determined I was plagiarized but my battle was to no effect.  The damage had been done.

Monica Crawley is up and about now screaming that her plagiarism was "nothing to see here but just

another attack by the wicked left wing main stream press" who attacked her with the same "gotcha" as they have gone after several other Trump folks.   She has been painted with some sort of tar and feather brush - never mind that Trump fired her, her publisher pulled her book, her doctoral degree dissertation is "under review", and she can't get a gig that pays because she is a plagiarist.

Plagiarism is fraud. 

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, to "plagiarize" means

• to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
• to use (another's production) without crediting the source
• to commit literary theft
• to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward.

Ball is in your court Monica.