PLAGIARISM, HARDCORE AND SOFTCORE

by Thomas M. Paikeday

[DISCUSSION PAPER, 7 Nov. 1993]

FOREWORD

You may find this paper quite enjoyable. At least Vice-Provost David Cook of the University of Toronto did; please see his letter reproduced below. Dr. Cook administers the "Code of Behaviour on Academic Matters" at the university.

"Plagiarism, Hardcore and Softcore" discusses the question of American dictionaries being passed off as Canadian without any acknowledgment of their true authorship on the title page or copyright page and with patently false claims such as: "Whereas other dictionaries call themselves 'Canadian,' the Gage Canadian Dictionary is the only dictionary compiled, edited, and produced in Canada."

The paper also discusses wider issues such as the consumer's right to know how much Canadian content there is in books represented as Canadian, misleading advertising under Canada's Competition Act, the general question of plagiarism, educational institutions using derivative American dictionaries instead of original works of Canadian scholarship as tools for the teaching of a national language, and the moral question whether the use of dictionaries of dubious authorship in schools might, by its toleration of misrepresentation, give quiet encouragement to other forms of dishonest behaviour.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the spirit of pure cricket, this paper has been checked with all parties whose interests may be affected by the opinions expressed in it. I have tried to accommodate their wishes by making changes to the manuscript wherever possible without ignoring relevant facts or prejudicing the discussion. Thanks in particular are due to the following for commenting on the paper: ROSEMARY COURTNEY (editor of the inimitable Longman Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs and currently lexicographer of the Gage dictionaries) who, understandably, made the bare statement that she wouldn't like to comment on it as "it is critical of [her] company." PATRICK DRYSDALE (Oxford, UK), who was the chief lexicographer of the 1967 and 1983 editions of the Gage dictionaries, for his frank and forthright remarks, albeit with reservations, especially that (a) Gage's claim about theirs being the only dictionary compiled, edited, and produced in Canada is foolish; (b) Gage should change their advertising and acknowledge the American source of their dictionaries.* ROBERT BURCHFIELD (Oxford, UK) for expressing interest in seeing the paper published and for friendly advice about not enraging Larry.
LAURENCE URDANG (Old Lyme, Conn.) for a critique that matches this paper in size and occasionally takes on the qualities of a diatribe, but without use of the "excremental" sort of vocabulary that has tarnished Milton's Areopagitica. Prof. JOHN WILLINSKY (University of British Columbia, head of the task force on copyright, Canadian Council of Teachers of English) for his strong moral support. Veteran lexicographers FREDERIC CASSIDY (professor emeritus, University of Wisconsin), DAVID GURALNIK (emeritus, Simon & Schuster, Cleveland) and SOL STEINMETZ (Random House, New York) and linguist RONALD BUTTERS (Duke University) for their friendly comments. (Prof. Butters has expressed interest in putting the paper on file for the students of his course on "Linguistic Crimes." Several years back, he acted as a "forensic linguistics" consultant for a major Canadian university). Vice-Provost DAVID COOK for his valuable observations based on humane treatment of plagiarists at the University of Toronto and for permission to use his letter here. Prof. N. PARKER-JERVIS (Victoria, BC) and my former assistant lexicographer Prof. BRAD INWOOD (University of Toronto) for helpful editorial suggestions. PATRICK MEANY of Mississauga, long-time trustee and retired chairman of the Dufferin-Peel Separate School Board, and many other consultants and readers too numerous to mention, for various useful comments.

Plagiarism seems to be a hot topic in academic circles nowadays. The 1992 convention of the Modern Language Association of America had two sessions on the subject.

For the 1993 MLA (Toronto), one session is headed "Linguistic Crimes: Plagiarism, Forgery, and Censorship." A condensed version of this paper is to be presented to the same convention at a session (Dec. 29, 12 noon, Sheraton Centre) named "International Perspectives on Present-Day English Language."

Our own discussion continues and your further comments are invited; see questionnaire on the last page. It seems to have the makings of a Socratic dialogue like my The Native Speaker Is Dead! (Toronto and New York, 1985) which, judging by the reviews, was well received by the scholarly world. If the response to this paper warrants it, I would like to reformat it as a debate with Larry Urdang as the leader of her majesty's commercial opposition (similar to the role that Noam Chomsky was gracious enough to assume in the linguistic debate) and publish it as a non-profit project.

As in in the case of the linguistic monograph, permission will be sought before your comments are included in the publication.

*At this writing, Gage is reported to have agreed to drop the first claim but not the claim of originality B the main point of this paper.

PLAGIARISM, HARDCORE
AND SOFTCORE

Plagiarism, like many other things in life, seems to come in hardcore and softcore versions.

First, however, what is plagiarism?

Webster's Third New International Dictionary (the most authoritative of the unabridged North American dictionaries) defines "plagiarize" as "to steal and pass off as one's own (the ideas or words of another): use (a created production) without crediting the source" [italics added].

As the Webster's Explanatory Notes (11.2) says, the colon is used to separate "two or more definitions." In this lexicographer's view, the first definition embodies hardcore plagiarism and the second the softcore variety. The difference between the two is that the hardcore kind combines stealing with passing off, but softcore plagiarism has only the second element B passing off a "created production" (as the Webster somewhat inelegantly puts it) that was not stolen at all. Only lying is involved here, not stealing. The softcore plagiarist may have paid good money for the literary goods he passes off as his own.

Student cheating involving purchased material is a textbook example of softcore plagiarism. Commercial essay services in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Toronto charge around $20 per page of 250 words. Students who pass off such essays as their own after making a few changes to add the personal touch are not dealing in stolen property at all, but just "not crediting the source." If they were to credit the source, of course, they might lose all the credit they ever had at their universities.

Mature adult hardcore plagiarism is what makes headlines, especially when important people like Martin Luther King and Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware are involved. Here are some of the headlines of yesteryear: "A dean is charged with plagiarizing a dissertation for his book on Muzak"; "Noted Harvard psychologist resigns"; "University of Minnesota chief quits"; "Award-winning Toronto Star columnist found dead."

Plagiarism with a heart

On a Sunday morning once in the Seventies, during a somewhat somnolent sermon at a church I used to attend, I suddenly woke up telling myself, "Hey, there's something false about what I'm hearing. The voice is clearly Jacob's, but the hands feel like Esau's. It just doesn't ring true." I could tell while I dozed, thanks to the kind of linguistic analysis that doesn't require the linguist to be fully awake, that the sermon the good pastor was reading to us from the pulpit was not his own. Inquiries showed he was using a syndicated service.

This may be plagiarism (if you want to call it that) with the softest core of all, plagiarism with a heart, if you like, plagiarism in the service of God. Father so-and-so probably believed he had only been called to the priesthood to say Mass, take care of his flock, and counsel them on an individual basis. He didn't seem to see sermonizing congregations weaned on TV as part of his vocation. Or perhaps he thought preaching to that congregation from the heart rather than from a commercial script would be like casting pearls before swine!

And how about the speeches that politicians and even princes make? Of course, all of them use speech writers. But this is such a well-known fact no one thinks of it as plagiarism B forget about hardcore and softcore B unless, of course, a written piece sounds like something that has already been published by oneself, as it happens sometimes to columnists. But copying from oneself, when found out, could be written off as an embarrassment, without the ignominy that results from plagiarism.

This author is reminded of his own role as speech writer to his children when they were in elementary school. Teachers reward such activity with prizes if the children put in their own two cents worth of originality by memorizing the speeches and delivering them well. It is like parents helping children with homework; it is all right as long as the children deliver the goods. As for children "crediting the source" of their speeches and homework, I suppose they don't have to do it since they are at an age when almost everything they have by nature or nurture comes from their parents.

However, in junior high, when children have grown up to be teenagers, they are able to stand on their own legs, like the legendary youngster who claimed, "God made me a tiny baby and I grew the rest." It is not "cool" any more to use speeches written by parents. Teens can talk without the benefit of even notes on any subject they are familiar with, even lecture their erstwhile speech writers. Preachers who prefer to read packaged sermons have apparently lost their youthful spontaneity, thanks probably to education.

Ghostwritten books and articles are also a class apart in regard to plagiarism. Legally speaking, such writings are literature "made for hire" for the benefit of the one who pays, and who thereby gets title to the properties created. Most dictionaries and reference books are thus created by editors working for corporations in an employer-employee relationship.

The question of plagiarism, whether hardcore or softcore, arises only when lying is involved. Suppose the Queen's representative in a Canadian province or the Governor General himself (or herself) claimed in the exordium of a Throne Speech that he was not a mere dummy in the hands of a ventriloquist government, but that his speech was an original creation, to wit, the only Throne Speech ever given in this country that was written, edited, and produced (more about this later) by a Queen's representative burning the midnight oil. That would be a preposterous thing to say in a Throne Speech and His Excellency would look like a pretender and a plagiarist to boot. Not that anyone might give a hoot. Such a claim would have everyone in stitches and only spoil the solemnity of the opening of parliament.

The first question anyone studying plagiarism should ask is, What exactly is lying? According to one school of ethics, it is the denial of truth to a party that has the right to know the truth: "negatio veritatis debitae." If your neighbour, for example, smelling a rat, asks you on Monday morning how your out-of-town weekend went, if you are not in the mood to boast about your sexual prowess, you just say "Fine" and change the subject. But when your spouse asks you the same question even without smelling a rat, you have to tell her (or him) where exactly you had been, whether you had overnight guests in your motel room, etc. You owe it to her. Otherwise, you are lying and, of course, cheating; it becomes a question of truth or consequences.

Educational authorities have a right to know whether you wrote that essay or dissertation yourself and whether you forgot to put in quotation marks in all the right places. On the other hand, a church congregation is supposed to listen to their pastor like sheep ("pastor" is Latin for "shepherd"), with no questions asked about the sources of his inspiration. And politicians, by definition, are supposed to play politics, so the question of the validity of the promises they make or who wrote the speeches in which the promises are made does not even arise. But if a journalist can dig up a politician's murky past as a student or writer, that is another story.

A basic question may be whether we humans can live with the kind of truth that our less sophisticated cousins such as animals do. Take nudism, for instance, which is based on the claim (Britannica, 1977, s.v. nudism) that it "creates a higher standard of sincerity and frankness ... by removing the false mystique of the body, especially woman's". But do women and men socializing in their birthday suits really expose themselves, warts and all? Women at nudist camps may be using makeup (they can't, of course, do anything about implants) just as men might keep their hairpieces on. Literature put out by one naturist camp even recommends that members be clean-shaven because it is aesthetically more pleasing, at least to the management, than being hairy. And they are not talking hairy chests. Is that truthfulness? Nudist camps probably exist mostly for the ungrammatical fun of dangling one's participles in public!

Absolute truth, therefore, like everything else that is abstract and absolute, cannot exist in reality. What can exist is truth that is compatible with our rights and responsibilities as social beings, like not being caught with your pants down.
The specific question I would like to pose here is whether consumers, who trustingly pay for what they buy thinking they are getting value for their money, have a right to what is called "truth in advertising" when they are sold what are purported to be "Canadian" dictionaries with absolutely no disclosure of ingredients on the packaging.

Why they plagiarize

First, however, I would like to examine the reasons why people plagiarize.

Student plagiarism has been studied in depth and written about in articles headed "Plagiarism in high school: a survey," "Dear Teacher, Johnny copied," and "Anorexia: the cheating disorder" in such professional journals as English Journal (Feb. 86), Reading Teacher (Oct. 87), and College English (Dec. 90), respectively. The reasons why students resort to cheating are pretty obvious though. Researching and writing an original term paper or essay, complete with footnotes and references, is hard work. Students who plagiarize either lack the brains needed to do the work themselves or want to take the shortcut to success, like athletes using performance-enhancing drugs.

Sometimes the nature of the work itself is to blame for plagiarism; at least the plagiarists may like to think so. Libraries are stocked with everything that has been written on topics from Aristotle to Zwingli. Not all of it has been read by the professors, however, and they could even have forgotten what they read, so why bother creating unnecessary garbage, the student who has plagiarism on the brain might ask. Moreover, the student who lacks self-confidence may feel that the quality of published material and of what is written for him by someone else is much higher than that of anything he might write himself.

The Montreal Gazette recently reported (27 Apr. 1988) that the city's leading essay service assured a customer who worried about the quality of the bootleg he was buying that the essay was written by a university professor! Probably one of those who had to retire to private practice after hitting the headlines. Now it becomes professors helping students to cheat professors B a vicious circle in which not only truth but also education suffers.

Plagiarism in dictionaries

The nature of the work being partly to blame is especially true in occupations like mine. Samuel Johnson referred to the lexicographer as a "harmless drudge." But the temptation to stray from the harmless path and avoid the drudgery is always there. Dictionaries are perennial bestsellers, but compiling an original dictionary of the same old tired vocabulary, from aardvark to zymurgy (or to zzz, the latest and, literally speaking, probably the last word in English lexicography) could put the lexicographer to sleep, unless he is an innovator who has ideas about newer and better ways of presenting the information which might keep him awake even when he should be sleeping.

The would-be dictionary publisher who is unwilling or unable to spend the time and money to have a dictionary written from scratch might consider "taking" the basic material from an already published work and packaging it differently to sell to his particular market. But that would be hardcore plagiarism with sad consequences if found out.

Thirty years ago, Prof. Roger Steiner (an American lexicographer of French and English dictionaries) pointed out in a review (Modern Language Journal, March 1961) how a Cassell's Spanish dictionary had claimed in its Preface that it was an "entirely new" dictionary. But the dictionary had given itself away by repeating misprints and tell-tale Castillianisms from an earlier work: an obvious case of lexicography with the hardcore touch.

So our commercial publisher decides to go softcore and purchase or lease the basic material from a dictionary that caters to markets similar to his. He shops around and checks what is available. Let's say he samples the aardvarks for starters, like the following bunch:

"A large African mammal that burrows in the ground and lives on ants which it catches with its long sticky tongue" (Webster's New Students Dictionary).

"A burrowing African mammal that feeds on ants and termites: it has a long snout" (Webster's New World Dictionary, Second Concise Edition).

"A burrowing African mammal with a piglike snout, a long, sticky tongue, and very strong claws; ant bear" (Thorndike Barnhart Advanced Dictionary).

"An African anteater having a long snout and tongue and feeding on ants and termites. [from an Afrikaans word meaning 'earth pig']" (The Random House Dictionary, School Edition).

"A burrowing animal of southern Africa having powerful claws and a long, sticky tongue. It feeds on termites and ants" (HBJ School Dictionary).

At this stage, let us leave the dictionary publisher to do his shopping and observe how each of the above dictionaries avoids the wording of the others, although the animal they are trying to define is your basic aardvark.

But that is how original dictionaries are compiled. "Aardvark" may be an easy kill, but when you have to tackle a two-letter word like "be" or "do," the temptation to copy could become irresistible. The body may be willing but the spirit is weak. (What this lexicographer does in such moments of weakness is to take a ten-minute nap on his office couch which, as a computer whiz might say, clears the buffer. Then, with a fresh mind and a clear conscience, he tries to do unto his dictionary as he would have others do to theirs.

If you would like the lowdown on the manuscript which is the basis of the two dictionaries under my own copyright (The New York Times Everyday Dictionary, New York, 1982, and The Penguin Canadian Dictionary, Toronto, 1990), it was researched and compiled by me personally at my Mississauga offices between 1975 and 1979. About 12 lb. of the 51 lb. total manuscript was done under my supervision by an assistant editor working in my office as an employee; he is now a professor of classics at the University of Toronto. Since there were no microcomputers at the time nor viruses to infect them, the original manuscript is still extant in holographic hard-copy form! Anyone is welcome to examine it or the published books with a fine-tooth comb for signs of hardcore or softcore influence. I have never owed anyone a penny on either of my manuscripts in the shape of rent, lease, or royalties. This, I am sure, is more than the competition can say for themselves.

However, the copyright page of my New York Times dictionary may be misleading; it shows the New York Times Company (newspaper publisher) as the copyright holder. This was because of a concession I made at the book publisher's request for prestige reasons in consideration of the use of the newspaper's name in the dictionary's title. I had my copyright legally restored to me when the book went out of print. At no time before or after Times Books (book publisher) and I started negotiations on an author-publisher contract was I in an employer-employee or "work for hire" relationship with them; I hadn't even talked to Times Books before 1979.

The only payments I have received after signing the contract with Times Books are expenses for updating the 1979 manuscript for 1982 publication and royalties. Otherwise, the dictionary manuscript was complete and had even been marked up for typesetting when Times Books and I (with the help of a former publishing company president and my consultant who is alive and well and living in Connecticut) started negotiations in 1979.

The new Penguin Canadian Dictionary was commissioned in 1986 jointly by Penguin Books Canada and Copp Clark Pitman, two Longman companies publishing in Canada on the trade and educational fronts respectively. It was compiled between 1986 and 1989 using my 1979 manuscript as the basis and the computerized Canadian and other English-language resources including CD-ROM databases I had acquired since 1980.

I am not aware of any general-purpose English dictionary for home, school, and office compiled, edited, and produced in Canada with 100% Canadian content in existence before The Penguin Canadian Dictionary was published in 1990. The Gage claim on their 1983 dictionary seems to have been made first in 1990 after the Penguin dictionary was announced.

Public domain v. proprietary

In our society, scholars consider it unethical to use even a distinctive or well-turned phrase written by someone else without using quotes and, as the Webster says, "crediting the source." It would also be a violation of copyright if the borrowed material was of considerable length and had not been paid for; copyright violation is another aspect of hardcore plagiarism. This would be especially true if the original writer and the borrower were on competitive ground, like two journalists reviewing the same new books as they are published B the kind of plagiarism that led Ken Adachi of the Toronto Star to his unfortunate death.

On the other hand, a lexicographer using a distinctive phrase from a published source as an illustrative example, especially if its distinctiveness seems arguable as the phrase passes into common usage, would not be violating copyright.
Such phrases are "the fleshpots of Egypt" (Bible), "more things in heaven and earth" (Shakespeare), "fresh fields and pastures new" (a variation on Milton), and "winds of change" (Harold Macmillan, 1960). These are routinely recorded in a historical dictionary such as the Oxford English Dictionary with the complete quotations and full attribution of sources since they have become part of our linguistic heritage, although in course of time they could get shop-worn and begin to sound like clichJs. But the lexicographer of a general-purpose dictionary could use such phrases as illustrative examples without having to pepper his pages with quotation marks.

Other parts of the language that are by their very nature in the public domain are:

(a) entry words, without which there would be no dictionaries, namely, simple and compound words and word elements including suffixes, prefixes, and combining forms ("dial-a-" and "-athon," for example), and neologisms from "absolute address" to "zydeco" (whoever may have spotted them first).

(b) common collocations like "the common good" and "to come to no good," idioms with fixed forms and meanings that are more than the sum of their parts (like "to hold good" and "have the goods on someone"), catch phrases (e.g. "Same here!" and "Wake up and smell the coffee!"), proverbs, and trademarks like "xerox" used generically.

All of the above form the very fabric of the language as it has come down to us over the centuries. No one holds title to any of them. They are not like definitions.

To this should be added information or knowledge unearthed and spread by others. Such knowledge, after it has become pedestrian, is not protected by copyright; you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Thus, if the word "wheel" has been traced by philologists to an Old English word and ultimately to an Indo-European root, you just help yourself to the information and without even crediting any source. Since, however, copyrightability is in the form of expression rather than in knowledge or ideas, reputable dictionaries are careful to rephrase the same etymological facts in their own language. It is like gathering information about the aardvark from encyclopedias and other dictionaries without studying the animal at first-hand but writing your own definition instead of copying someone else's.

However, passing off arcane information (and products on which there may be no patents pending) as one's original contribution to knowledge, as for satisfying academic requirements, would not only be dishonest but also a cruel joke on the authorities who should be able to detect such plagiarism.

Burchfield v. Urdang

The question of plagiarism in dictionaries was raised in a big way in 1984 when Robert W. Burchfield, the lexicographer of the Supplements to the Oxford English Dictionary, had an article published in the British monthly Encounter (Sept.-Oct. issue). It appeared under the title "Dictionaries, New & Old / Who Plagiarises Whom, Why & When?" In it, Burchfield traced the genealogy of several dictionaries with international connections. One of them was the Australian Macquarie Dictionary (1981) which he showed was based on the British Hamlyn's Encyclopedic World Dictionary (1971), which in turn had been based on the American College Dictionary (1969 edition, original edition 1947), itself based on the Century Dictionary & Cyclopedia (1889). (Macquarie has tried to market their dictionary in Canada, but to my knowledge, no Canadian publisher has yet fallen for it, which is quite understandable when Canadians are locked in a love-triangle with British and American dictionaries, the latter being the linguistically sexier of the two).

Burchfield's contention in regard to the Australian dictionary was that the acknowledgment was not explicit enough and that it was tucked away inside the Preface.

Laurence Urdang, a lexicographical heavyweight who was responsible for one of the dictionaries with international connections which Burchfield had attacked, countered by pointing out that all his dictionaries had been paid for. But Urdang also claimed that the "manner in which the acknowledgments are set forth, both in wording and in prominence B and, in fact, whether they are required at all [italics added] B is a matter between owners and the purchasers of the rights; it is not, conceivably, any of Mr. Burchfield's business."

I think it was Mr. Burchfield's business all right. In fact, it is the business of any purchaser of a dictionary or any product, for that matter, to inquire into the ingredients of what they are paying for. This is a basic right of any consumer in a democratic, especially consumer society. Mr. Burchfield was on strong ground ethically as well as morally; and I would think even legally, according to the common law. Mr. Urdang was clearly on wet ground; he was (unwittingly) putting in a plea in favour of softcore plagiarism.

In the plagiarist's paradise, one English dictionary might suffice for the entire English-speaking world. Such a dictionary would act as the mother of all dictionaries, and lexicographers could not only milk this Minerva but even copy her verbatim, normally after paying a small fee. They could then customize the product for individual markets and practically live off the avails!

But that would be more like a communist dispensation; it would not suit our free-market economy. In our free-market economy, in fairness to the dictionary-buying public and to lexicographers who compile their own dictionaries, I think all derivative works should be made to carry a declaration on their title pages or copyright pages stating what each work is based on. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has such a requirement in regard to the law-book industry (16 CFR, 256.11). One is also reminded of the court injunctions issued in the U.S. from time to time at the instance of Merriam-Webster Inc. forcing dictionary publishers caught in "passing off" actions to carry a declaration on their title pages stating, "This book is not published by the original publishers of Webster's Dictionary, or by their successors."
"Webster's" has been a legally gen eric word meaning "American English dictionary" since an 1890 judgment (Merriam v. Holloway), but you still can't pass off any Webster as a "Merriam-Webster" which is a registered trademark.
The origin of a product, especially in a sensitive cultural area such as a dictionary of the national language, is a crucial issue when a foreign product or a slightly altered one is being passed off as an indigenous creation.

The Macquarie lexicographers had at least acknowledged their source, even if not on the copyright page which is the legal and logical place for such an acknowledgment. Moreover, they didn't make any preposterous claims like the imaginary Governor General mentioned above.

The Gage dictionaries

Back home from down under, our Gage Canadian Dictionary is an interesting example of a dictionary that acknowledged its American origin in the first edition, but has chosen not to credit the source in later editions. Consequently, organizations like the Freelance Writers Association of Canada (as stated in their style guide) have been led to believe the book was "created in Canada."

Here is what Gage claims, in place of an acknowledgment, on its dust jacket and on the cover of its paperback edition:
"While other dictionaries may call themselves 'Canadian,' the Gage Canadian Dictionary is the only dictionary compiled, edited and produced in Canada."

Now, doesn't that remind you of the Throne Speech mentioned earlier? About two-thirds of the Gage as it now stands is identical to Thorndike-Barnhart High School Dictionary published in Chicago in 1965. That even includes entries like "plagiarism," "plagiarist," and "plagiarize." I can vouch for this because not only have I made a comparative study, using random samples, of the second Gage edition and its original, but I was in on the original action when the American dictionary was made over into the Canadian one. The Acknowledgments of the first edition (1967) thanks "Mr. T. M. Paikeday for his painstaking and scholarly work on the manuscript and proofs."

A sample (reconstructed) of the Gage manuscript is attached to this paper. As you can see, in 1967, Gage was obliged to credit its source on the copyright page itself. By 1983, however, Gage seems to have been free to throw off its foreign yoke and declare independence, while reportedly continuing to pay royalties (as they are probably obliged to do in perpetuity) to the owners of the original work.

If the Gage dictionaries were Gage's own properties, the owners would have been free to change the lexicographical character of the dictionaries as they wished, as I was free to do with the American Holt material when, using company property, I compiled the Winston Dictionaries of Canadian English (1969, 1970, 1975) for Holt, Rinehart & Winston of Canada, working as their employee and Head of Lexicography Division. But Gage is not free to change even an iota, literally, in the basic framework of the American dictionaries, at least they were not when I was working for them.

A case in point is the symbol "i." A macron placed over it to symbolize the long "i" ( i ) could not be used without the dot, but when the lexicographers of the American original decided to write their "i" macron without the dot ( i ), Gage could follow suit. Such professionally demeaning contractual obligations probably continue and may do so forever.
The result of Gage's misleading advertising is that Canadians of the present generation who use the book (like the Freelance Editors) think they have a 100% Canadian dictionary on their hands.

Gage's claim about "the only dictionary" must seem patently false and bordering on the absurd to anyone acquainted with other dictionaries on the Canadian market. One has only to check the listings under dictionary and dictionnaire in any good public library. These would show not only genuine Canadian dictionaries of biography, law, science, mythology, quotations, etc. but also dictionaries of languages including English, French, and both, dictionaries that have better claims to being Canadian than the Gage dictionaries.

What the law says

Section 37 of the Competition Act states that "Every one who publishes an advertisement containing a statement that purports to be a statement of fact but that is untrue, deceptive or misleading or is intentionally so worded or arranged that it is deceptive or misleading, is guilty of an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for five years, if the advertisement is published."

But Consumer and Corporate Affairs Canada which administers the Competition Act seems to be governed by principles of commercial and political expediency in regard to whom they decide to prosecute. They were successful in going after Remington (electric shaver) on a technicality, but got rapped on the knuckles by the judge for wasting taxpayers' money when they tried to prosecute Pepsi-Cola and Frito-Lay (potato chips) (Globe & Mail, 4 Sept. 1991).

Consumer and Corporate Affairs has also laid down two criteria which products represented to be of Canadian origin should satisfy. "First, the product must have come into being in Canada, in the sense that the last substantial process through which a new, identifiable end product is produced must have been performed in Canada. Second, the final product must have come into being with a direct Canadian labour and/or material content of at least 51 percent" (Misleading Advertising Bulletin, 1985, No. 4, p. 1).

In regard to dictionaries, the criteria for "Made in Canada" would translate into (1) printed and bound in Canada; (2) Canadian content, i.e. entries and definitions, of at least 51 percent.

I recently conducted an informal survey of teachers, editors, authors, and others on this question. There was general consensus (among the 30 who responded to my ad in the Globe & Mail) on the above interpretation of the criteria. On the question whether dictionary publishers who don't acknowledge the source of their material seem to be indulging in activity similar to that of students who plagiarize, 65% said Yes.

In addition, 92% of the respondents agreed that Consumer & Corporate Affairs should have a regulation requiring disclosure of the source of the "material content" of dictionaries.

Gage does say on the copyright page of its 1983 edition that it is a revision of its 1967 edition, but since no one except a lexicographical or legal researcher is going to check into the genealogy of this dictionary, the impression conveyed to the general public, as confirmed by a bibliographically wise group such as the Freelance Editors of Canada, is that this is a dictionary "Made in Canada."

Most so-called Canadian dictionaries of English get by with very little if any Canadian content. At best, they are Canadianized versions of American dictionaries. Some of the publishers of such dictionaries don't even bother to have their "Canadian" dictionaries typeset in Canada. They are content with patching in new entries on the film they purchased from America; they print their books off the patched-up film or plates. This is what Fitzhenry & Whiteside has been doing for over 15 years with the Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary (which was taken out of the U.S. market around 1975 as too outdated), now interestingly called Funk & Wagnalls Canadian College Dictionary. Some publishers simply package their American dictionaries between Canadian covers, like old wine in new bottles.

And they all seem to be operating on the safe side of the law, thanks to the protective policies of Consumer and Corporate Affairs Canada.

The teachers and others I polled were unanimous in their preference for a dictionary "Made in Canada," other things being equal, over one made in the U.K. or the U.S. Which brings us back to the question, Does the Canadian dictionary buyer have the right to know how much of the material content of the dictionaries they are told are Canadian is really Canadian?

The moral issue

In my view, when a dictionary or other reference book or textbook is meant for use in schools, even softcore plagiarism becomes not only unethical but downright immoral. Students and certainly the parents who send them to school have a right to expect that the books used in schools are genuine works of scholarship. Authors, and the teachers who use their books, have a moral obligation to ensure that this is so. We have to set a good example to our youth, don't we. Otherwise how can we blame them if they decide to go the devious way when faced with harder choices later on in life?

However, as we have seen above, creating a new Canadian dictionary from the ground up is hard work and very expensive. The Canadian Oxford University Press and other publishers who tried to prepare such a dictionary spent millions (in today's dollars) in the Sixties and Seventies on projects they finally had to abandon. When I took over at Holt in 1967, my first job was to sing the requiem for the "Winston Canadian Collegiate Dictionary" left unfinished by an editor who had been retired to make room for me. I have saved as a lexicographical souvenir a 24-page preprint of that still-born dictionary. But what had gone wrong with these enterprises?

As I wrote in Quill & Quire ("Do we have a Canadian dictionary?" April 1976), the main reason seems to have been lack of funds to pay for talent trained in the technicalities of planning and designing a dictionary and for keeping costs as well as editorial operations under control. A full-size dictionary is a somewhat complicated system, unlike many other books that come between two covers. Some of its component parts, such as phonetics and etymologies, call for professional scholarship in the compilation and painstaking attention to detail through the editorial processes.
....................................................................

END NOTE

As a discussion paper, this document was distributed to Canadian boards of education from coast to coast and selected university departments of English, with gratifying responses. In modified versions, it was also read to the Modern Language Association and York University's Applied Linguistics Research Working Group.

Gage publishers had their dictionary revised for its current edition to include more Canadian content.

Oxford Canada prepared and published its Canadian Oxford Dictionary in 1998. It instantly made the best-seller lists and compares well with the American desk dictionaries in size and scope. However, it is a Canadianized version of the great Concise Oxford Dictionary.

...........................................................

APPENDIX: The reconstructed sample page referred to in the article has been omitted here because of reproduction problems. Statistics of Gage's Canadian content (Gage Canadian Dictionary, 1983) based on sample entries from "misleading" to "miss":
Total number of characters & spaces = 4,159
New matter (replacements & additions) = 1,361
Proportion of new matter to total = 32.72%
Other pages show the same +/- 30% Canadian content.

Go To Top Of Page

© 2002, Thomas M. Paikeday