Who's Been Accused of Plagiarism? That'd Be Me!

by - Wednesday, March 11, 2009

I have been accused of plagiarism.

Apparently my last post, in which I explain curling in my own terms, in my post-Brier-volunteering catatonic state, has ticked off someone. And now they are apparently reporting me to Google.

I am deciding to fight this, since really... is what rolls around in my head and then gets typed plagiarism?

I sure as hell don't think so.

I explained curling. I used some curling terminology, since really - there are only so many words to use. A rock is a rock, a skip is a skip... well... you get it...

And I added hot guys. Which really - makes the blog post what it is.

As one of my Twitter friends put it (and I will quote it so I don't get in trouble again - and the only reason I am doing this is because I know this person has a public Twitter profile - and I am not even naming the person either, and I wouldn't ever do this if someone was private)...

@carmenincalgary That girl is nuts. That's like saying explaining baseball ='they run around the bases' is plagiarizing. MJ = dumb
Exactly!

And to top it all off, when I put my entire blog post into one of the many plagiarizing software programs available online... you know who I am plagiarizing?

MYSELF!

That of course means that only my blog post is listed...

With one exception (well... two - my other reference to red rocks came up with a match to Leonard Cohen - which I can assure you has nothing to do with the red rocks I am talking about). We both called curling a gentlemanly (actually, she calls it gentleman's game... but we both use the words "curling is a very" - which I am sure nobody else in the history of talking about/writing about curling has ever used those exact four words in succession before... yeah, right...) sport. Seriously... that constitutes plagiarism? Well, then according to my search, she also plagiarized (according to the 2000 article written by the Granite Curling club)... here is the result from Google Advanced (from articlechecker.com) search when I put my ENTIRE blog post in the search engine...And here is the search when I type in "curling gentlemanly game" into Google... over 26,700 results - honestly... I am not the first person to use the phrase, and neither was she!Needless to say, I have told her to go ahead and report me to Google all she wants. I will fight this one!

I made it through FIVE years of University without ever plagiarizing... does someone seriously think that I would start now on a blog post about curling?

PS... I am going to turn on comment moderation for a bit in case my accuser shows up... I'll turn it off in a couple of days when I am not so freaking pissed off.

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7 Comments

  1. unbelievable. you should tell your curling crushes about it ... maybe john morris will give you a smooch to make you feel better. making lemonade from lemons, yes? ;)

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  2. Anonymous6:04 PM

    Pardon my ignorance, but what does Google have to do with plagiarism? Do they remove plagiarized articles or something?

    I find it a little crazy that she considers this plagiarism. You obviously enjoy curling, you're a blogger, it only makes sense that you would enjoy talking about curling and this would be the place to do it. What fun is just stealing someone else's work?

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  3. OMG this is hilarious.

    DEFEAT THE MAN!

    I've fought off a bout of "plagerism" myself. If you want some advice let me know.

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  4. Dude... DUDE!! That is too fucked up! Can I say Fuck in your blog comments?

    Okay, I think that we can certainly say that if anyone gets to whack people with the plagiarism punishment stick - it would be me: a university English prof. Right?

    Seriously. SERIOUSLY - that is too insane!

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  5. Oh yeah, and don't encourage people to go to her site because she gets credit from helium (the site she posts on) for hits to her page. Really, it is a craptastic wanna-be writer place. So possibly this is how she tries to get traffic because it can't be that she actually thinks using the same *adjectives* to describe curling counts as plagiarism!

    Holy - do you know that people will talk about basketball players as tall!! Did you know that some people will talk about rugby as a crashing sport. And others talk about badminton as poncy!

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  6. Some people really shouldn't be allowed to have that much time on their hands.

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  7. I stopped over from the BlogHer list in my sidebar. This is seriously ridiculous, and I'm so sorry you've been gotten by a troll. Blasted trolls.

    And also, my husband is in love with the Canadian Olympic curling team. Oh, crap...am I going to get tagged for plagiarism for saying that? Or have only 347,983,745 people said that before?

    /sarcasm

    Hang in there.

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