Maurice Maeterlinck (Factlet 15)

  On relatively sunny days only short posts are produced, generally in the form of "Factlets." The last one related to Honoré Balzac and this one is about Maurice Maeterlinck. That in itself is amazing in that the producer is barely unilingual and has not read, in English, anything written by either man and would not be able to understand them at all in French.

  Maeterlinck is mentioned here, not because he wrote a book about,The Life of the Bee (an insect of current concern), but because he wrote one about termites. The interesting thing about The Life of Termites is that Maeterlinck produced the book although he may never have met one.

    Since I said this would be short, the point is that this post is really about plagiarism, a subject now even more concerning than bees. The Life of Termites has been described as  "a classic example of academic plagiarism". Living during "The Plagiarism Wars" raging on this continent, you have likely read many articles on the subject, but I doubt that any mention Maeterlinck who purloined most of The Soul of the White Ant, which was really written by the Afrikaner, Eugène Marais, and is really about termites. It is because of bespoke information such as this, that you visit Mulcahy's Miscellany. 

Post Script (often the useful part)
   This is the section that allows me to go on. You will know about the dismissal of an ivy league university president and the charges of plagiarism, and that combatants on either side in the other war (the culture one), are combing through the works of the enemies, who now may be nervous, even if they only copied something written in Afrikaans.
   If you are now thinking about subjecting the writing of your opponent or ex-spouse to the scrutiny of a commercial service like Turnitin, read first, this article: "The Plagiarism War Has Begun: Claudine Gay Was Taken Down by a Politically Motivated Investigation. Would the Same Approach Work for Any Academic?" The Atlantic, Jan. 4, 2024. 
  The author, Ian Bogost, attempting to answer the question raised in that title, ran his own dissertation through the plagiarism wringer, which seemed to show that he had copied most of it. That was not at all the case, so you need to be careful before you lay your own charges.
   The linguist, John McWhorter thinks, "We Need a New Word for 'Plagiarism'," (NYT, Jan. 23, 2024.) He argues that perhaps a distinction needs to be made between stealing ideas, or sentences from a fictional work, both of which are more problematic than cutting and pasting the basic boilerplate statements borrowed from non-fiction academic works. He concludes:
  "Cutting and pasting is not the same as stealing ideas. “Plagiarism,” as a term, should be restricted to the latter. That means we need a new term for the former. There is no reason the new term has to be a formal one derived from Latin like “plagiarism” — or “duplicative language” for that matter. And in fact perhaps it should not be. Latinate words tend to look and feel more intimidating, handy for things you get in trouble for. Our new term could be less menacing, in line with referring to something that should be sanctioned less, if at all. Perhaps we already have the term: “cutting and pasting” — as distinct from, rather than a form of, plagiarism."

Sources:
 For Maeterlinck, Wikipedia will do. For another example from the Factlet genre,  "Match Making" will do.

A Fact: Maeterlinck won The Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911.

See this for information about the winners of the Ig Nobel Prize.