JEREMY LOTT: Self-Plagiarism and Self-Pleasure.

Or, to use a less vulgar metaphor, self-plagiarism is like self-stealing — a logical fallacy. You see, it takes two to plagiarize: one to come up with the words in the first place; the other to steal those words and pass them off, without attribution, as his own.

If you create words in one context and then put them to a different purpose there might, conceivably, be copyright infringement involved. Or the double-dipping might offend an editor and cost you future income.

Yet copyright infringement and double dipping are not plagiarism. Any pretense that they are the same amounts to defining plagiarism down, and you can quote me on that.

Yes, Peter Morgan and I have discussed this in The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society, a book that is, alas, always timely.