A Point of Etymology

I have concerned myself in earlier blog entries here with various plagiarism scandals. Here for example.

There now appears to be a plagiarism scandal underway in the southern hemisphere. Isn't the web wonderful? How else would I ever have encountered a New Zealand newspaper story? Anyway, it appears that a novel written by Witi Ihimaera, an English Professor at Auckland University, is replete with stolen goods. So much so that he is buying back copies of his book, presumably to re-write those passages and issue a theft-free edition.

The simple and obvious question is: does Ihimaera flunk out those of his students who do stuff like this? Thank God for hypocrisy. Or, at least, for the sake of the education of the affected youngsters, I HOPE he's a hypocrite.

So let us take this occasion to be explicit about the etymology of the word "plagiarism." It comes from the Latin word plagiarius, which means: kidnapper. That seems a straightforward adaptation of meaning.

Plagiarus in turn came ultimately from the root PLAK, meaning "to weave." As one would weave a net as a snare or a trap. For kidnapping.

None of this tells us anything new about the offense, but then etymology like philosophy leaves the world as they each find it.