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Caught in the Quote

From Volume 5, Number 1, January 1996 issue of The “Quote... Unquote” Newsletter

Accusations of plagiarism and grand larceny in the quotation dictionary world are commonplace. The onlooker might reasonably wonder what all the fuss is about – surely, the selector of a quotation for a dictionary or anthology can hardly be said to ‘own’ the quotation, especially as he did not write or say it in the first place?

Yes, but what rankles is when a dictionary compiler finds that one of his collections – together with all the research and footnoting – has been taken over wholesale by the editor of a later dictionary. This is usually done without any acknowledgement at all, but any denial by the Johnny-come-lately editor is usually exploded when it is pointed out to him that not only has he hoovered his way through the earlier collection, but that he has picked up all the tell-tale errors on the way.

When this plundering happens to my works, I console myself with what I read in Elizabeth Murray’s Caught in the Web of Words (1977) about Sir James Murray, founder of The Oxford English Dictionary. When the Century Dictionary published in 1889 seemed to plagiarize the OED, ‘all his friends...reminded him that the traditional practice of Dictionary makers was “to copy shamelessly from one dictionary to another”.’

Which is all rather a long-winded way of leading up to a little discovery I made when browsing through the hefty Collins Dictionary of Quotations, recently published by HarperCollins. Despite having two academics as editors, it is abundantly clear that this is largely what is known in the trade as a ‘scissors and paste’ job. A team of magpies has simply gutted existing dictionaries without apparently contributing anything new by way of quotation or attribution or research or checking of its own.

So, imagine my delight when I came across this entry:

Simon, Guy (1944- )
1. Jimmy Carter had the air of a man who had never taken any decisions in his life. They had always taken him.
[The Sunday Times, 1978]

‘Guy Simon’ is a pen-name I sometimes use. Curiously, he has the same year of birth as me. And that rather feeble little observation was a dummy I had deliberately concocted for my Fontana Dictionary of Twentieth Century Quotations (1987) with the express purpose of seeing whether it would get picked up, just as it has been by the HarperCollins mob without any checking to see whether it had really appeared in The Sunday Times on the date I gave (5 June 1978 – not even a Sunday!)

Laugh? – I could have sued. In fact, it was unnecessary to do so as CollinsReference, as they amusingly print themselves, sent round a bundle of banknotes when the error of their ways – and numerous other ‘borrowings’ from my books – was pointed out to them.