#EDIT: it was introduced to *the americas* NOT the US in (probably) 1727

[therainbowwillow]

hbomberguy’s latest video on plagiarism has made me completely rethink literature and writing. I have never once so much as considered intentionally plagiarizing anyone or anything, but I think there’s something more that has come out of this: the names of the people who created the works Somerton (and others) ripped off.

Plagiarism isn’t only bad because it is lazy and disrespectful, it’s bad because it buries the truth. If you can’t find a source, the conversation is over. Somerton’s sources are fairly easy to find by simply searching his plagiarized lines, but that isn’t true in most cases. Most of the time, the line from statement to source is a lot less clear.

Today, I was writing a report on English Ivy, which is an invasive species here in the US. I wanted to know when it was introduced and I at last found a source claiming it was introduced to the Americas “as early as 1727” on a .net website that seems quite reputable (it has multiple major universities credited in its home page), but there is no citation for where this date came from. I dug deeper and found a pamphlet created by a city government in Virginia that made the same claim, only to discover the first source linked in their bibliography. Another website (a botanical garden’s page) gave the same date with the same source hyperlinked. Of course, I have classes to attend and things to do and probably not enough time to follow the lines back to where this 1727 date came from, but if I had not just watched this video, I wouldn’t have given that date a second thought.

Of course, it doesn’t matter in the long run exactly what year hedera helix was introduced to the Americas, but it makes you wonder how many facts have been so vaguely attributed that it becomes completely impossible to figure out where they originated (and further, whether or not they’re true at all).

#hbomberguy #james somerton #plagarism #EDIT: it was introduced to *the americas* NOT the US in (probably) 1727 #THANK YOU anon ask person!!! #the US didn’t exist in 1727