Plagiarism, sometimes much easier to spot than to spell correctly, is the stealing and passing off as one’s own the words or ideas of another. In the publishing business, such a low-life crime is considered the moral equivalent of robbing a blind panhandler of his daily take and then claiming you had earned the money, fair and square.

Were you to be charged with either offense you would not want it shouted from the rooftops, or leading the 6 o’clock newscast. And so it was that a six-column headline that dominated Page A4 of Tuesday’s newspaper caught my attention.

“Clinton campaign accuses Obama of plagiarism,” the headline screamed. The Associated Press news story reported that advisers to Hillary Clinton had accused Democratic rival Barack Obama of borrowing heavily from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s oratory without giving proper credit to Patrick.

The brazen theft supposedly had happened while Obama attempted to deflate Clinton’s near-daily suggestion that her upstart rival talks a good game but offers precious few specifics about the premise of his candidacy.

“Don’t tell me that words don’t matter,” Obama told a Wisconsin audience. “‘I have a dream’ – just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ – just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ – just words? Just speeches?”

To back up its contention that Obama had plagiarized that portion of his speech, the Clinton campaign dug up a remarkably similar passage from a speech made by Patrick during his 2006 gubernatorial campaign in which he had addressed charges made by his Republican opponent that he, too, was all talk and no substance.

“‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ – just words? Just words?” Patrick had asked his audience. “‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ – just words? ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’ Just words? ‘I have a dream’ – just words?”

That neither Obama nor Patrick had credited Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and, in Patrick’s case, John F. Kennedy, as well, for the quotations employed in stating the case for inspirational campaign rhetoric was not mentioned by the Clinton camp.

Considering the context in which the quotations were used – as famous lines that anyone with a pulse and even a slight knowledge of history would recognize as being “not just words” – it probably was not necessary to give credit to those great American icons.

But the incident served to remind that when it comes to making one’s point in a political speech, even the great ones may not have been averse to doing a little borrowing of their own to fire up the electorate.

Look up Roosevelt’s “nothing-to-fear” quote in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, for example, and you will find that the popular reference book credits six other sources for essentially the same line: Proverbs 3:25 and 23:6, Montaigne, Bacon, Wellington and Thoreau. Perhaps each may have properly attributed his observation to a predecessor, although I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

“The thing I fear most is fear,” wrote Montaigne in 1580. “The only thing I am afraid of is fear,” is how the Duke of Wellington put it in 1831. “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear,” Thoreau chimed in 20 years later. Great minds apparently run in the same channels. Or not.

And therein lies the rub with the plagiarism thing. One man’s seemingly original utterance can be another man’s plagiarism, and vice versa. Obama said he and Patrick are friends who have occasionally borrowed language from each other, “So I really don’t think this is too big of a deal.”

He may be right about that. Serious cases of plagiarism generally tend to concern the lifting of words and ideas on a much grander and more nefarious scale than the rearrangement of a few borrowed golden-oldie quotes as throw-away lines in some politician’s campaign speech.

Still, the seed of suspicion has been planted. In plagiarism cases, it’s not only the theft of words or ideas that rankles. It’s also the perception that the alleged plagiarist, lazy and arrogant, would consider himself – or herself – smart enough to pull it off, particularly in a technologically advanced age in which exposure of the fraud likely lies only a few clicks of a computer mouse away.

When the predictable resulting nastiness could easily have been avoided by the simple act of fairly giving credit where credit is due, that’s just plain dumb.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact him by

e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.