Saturday, May 06, 2006

Sophomore

The overblown Kaavya Viswanathan episode should expand the meaning of "sophomoric" to include "plagiaristic".Till date ,the meaning has been (courtesy:wikipedia):

"In the US, a sophomore is a second-year student. Folk-Etymologically, the word is said to mean "wise fool"; consequently sophomoric means "pretentious, bombastic, inflated in style or manner; immature, crude, superficial" (according to the Oxford English Dictionary). While it appears to be formed from Greek sophos, meaning "wise", and moros meaning "foolish", it is in truth from the word sophumer, an obsolete variant of sophism [1]. "

This seems to be the season of plagiarism.Raytheon's CEO recently published a plagiarised version of managerial ideas.The Board denied him a raise,as a consequence.Incidentally,as the saying goes,if you copy from one source,it is plagiarism.If your sources are multiple,it is research.