We need a new word. Explanation forthcoming. First, please read the following two sentences:
1) Among the things the free market is free of is conscience.
2) New Yorker writer Jonah Lehrer plagiarizes himself repeatedly.
The second sentence was a recent headline in New York Magazine. This story was about how Lehrer, just hired by the best magazine ever, has recycled material repeatedly among his various publishing venues – among them, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Magazine, Wired and his own 2009 book, How We Decide. Various bloggers sniffed out many damning examples of wholesale copying-and-pasting, sometimes in multiple-paragraph chunks.
Exhibit A was Lehrer's recitation of a confounding psychological test – in the form of a simple math problem – routinely failed by even the most educated respondents. This is how Lehrer set it up in the Journal:
"Here's a simple arithmetic question: 'A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?'"
The answer, duh, is 5 cents, although evidently most people rush to say 10 cents – which is kind of amazing. But, as observed first by blogger Jim Romenesko, not as amazing as how Lehrer began a similar piece in the The New Yorker:
"Here's a simple arithmetic question: 'A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?'"
What followed was an eerily familiar explanation of the phenomenon – eerie because it was a nearly verbatim rip-off of Lehrer's own Journal feature. Hence the accusation "self-plagiarism".
Except, of course – as many commenters immediately observed – there is no such thing as self-plagiarism, any more than there is such thing as self-burglary. You can't steal from yourself.
What Lehrer has been doing in repackaging previously published material is plenty unethical, all right, but it ain't plagiarism, which is passing off someone else's words or ideas as your own. In journalism, that is a firing offense. In science and academia, it is a career killer. (There are only two ways to lose a tenured position. The other is being caught naked in a crack house with an undergraduate.)
So if Lehrer was cribbing only from himself, the what's-all-the-fuss-o-sphere wanted to know, who precisely was harmed? Not his New Yorker readers, surely, who, in all probability, were encountering the glove-and-ball test for the first time. No, the victim was his new employer, which has an implicit compact with its readers that published material is both new and original.
It has an identical compact with its contributors – quite explicit in the case of freelance contracts – and would never have published Lehrer's piece had it been aware of the Journal version. In most journalistic quarters, it is deemed unethical even to pitch the same story to multiple editors simultaneously.
Actually, we don't need a new word for Lehrer's conduct at all.
It's called polygamy. When you start consorting with more than one partner at a time, your bare-minimum requirement is full disclosure.
Of course, sometimes a writer can't exactly do that. If you want 7'30" minutes of extremely amusing viewing, check out the YouTube video titled "Sorkinisms: a Supercut". It strings together many, many brief clips of dialogue from West Wing, SportsNight, The Social Network, Newsroom, A Few Good Men and other Aaron Sorkin-penned dramas to document his habit of reusing certain phrases and constructions, some commonplace, some obscure.
Commonplace: "That was predictable."
Obscure: "As if it matters how a man falls down … when the fall is all that's left, it matters very much."
To watch the video is to wonder if Sorkin has about a dozen stock phrases that he has constructed a career around … but, come on, that's just the effect of clever editing and wholly unnatural concentration. The guy has written a million words of dialogue. He can be forgiven some tics, and, as far as I'm concerned, even repetition with malice aforethought.
Which is why John Williams' score for Harry Potter at moments sounds strikingly like his score for Schindler's List (!). Some stuff is just too good to be used only once – especially when it has ear-worm or aphorism potential.
This gets to that sentence No 1 above. I have seen it in the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, Advertising Age, the Washington Post and the 2009 book The Chaos Scenario, all by the same author. In fact, the line may also appear in the guy's previous book, as well.
I know this because that author is me.
The line is about capitalist mischief, and the vigorous governmental regulation needed to keep free marketeers from stealing us all blind. It's a subject near and dear to my heart, and one I have written about in several contexts – from stockmarket primers to advertising criticism, to a 4,000-word paean to Big Government. So am I a self-plagiarist?
Nope. We've established that to be an impossibility. And it isn't polygamy, either, because there's a difference between a single well-rehearsed pickup line and a warrant of exclusivity. No, clearly, we need a term to describe a writer with a history of situational repurposing – and I'll leave that to you.
Seriously, get neologizing. I'm busy with another publication, so I'm turning this one over to the free market of ideas. But, please, be original. Because, as someone once or twice – or seven times – said, one thing the free market of ideas is free of is …