The Scourge of Plagiary: Perversions of Imitation in the English Renaissance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When satirists first used the Latin legal term plagiary (literally “kidnapper”) as a metaphor for literary misappropriation in English at the turn of the seventeenth century, their mistaken belief that it derived from the word for whip (plaga) fit well with their humanist education: students were beaten for their failures to imitate successfully in the same way that kidnappers had presumably been punished in ancient Rome; they were whipped. This folk etymology helps explain why the earliest recorded accusations of plagiarism in English take place in satires associated with the scourge; it also illustrates how definitions and accusations of plagiarism were themselves often plagiarized. England’s satirists publicly whipped each other for their own private failures of imitation as they had learned to do in the early modern grammar school in ways that resonate with how plagiarism is identified and punished today.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".