Thursday, February 19, 2004

Franco Aleman pointed out to me this here gem from La Vangua. It seems to me that the guy who signed this article, Roger Jimenez, is a plagiarist because his signed piece is simply a repetition--he didn't even bother changing too many words--of a common Internet story, an urban legend. If you look at old Saturday Evening Posts or Reader's Digests, you'll see this one come up every couple of years. In the American 1940s-50s version, the American government is the insufferable bureaucracy that is going to impose these ridiculous spelling changes that make everything much more complicated than it needs to be. In the bit Mr. Jimenez ripped off, it's the European Union. It's the same joke, though, and it's been around for at least sixty years. I imagine that Mr. Jimenez didn't even invent the Spanish version of this urban myth; somebody else probably adapted it from English long ago. Is the Vangua going to bust him? Well, they didn't do it to Marius Serra for exactly the same crime, so I don't know why they'd even consider coming down hard on Jimenez.

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