Thursday, June 15, 2017

Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize Lecture


     Every semester that I teach I discover that a student has plagiarized. I tell them that it is theft. Sometimes it is due to incorrect citation. But usually it is clearly trying to put one past me. My favorite example remains a sonnet that used the word shibboleth; this is not a word that many adults know. I asked the student about It, and he had no idea what it meant!

     When I saw today that Bob Dylan was accused to lifted a large part of this Nobel
Prize acceptance speech from Cliff Notes, I shook my head. If you do not know what these notes are, they are aids to works of literature. Some students will read them instead of the actual work of literature.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/arts/music/bob-dylan-nobel-lecture-sparknotes.html?_r=0

     While not outright plagiarism, what Dylan did appears to come close. A Nobel Laureate, especially for Literature, should have done better. Maybe he was letting us know what he really thinks.

     As for shibboleth, http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words/shibboleth.html


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