Whatever Roget’s Thesaurus may have you believe, sinister buttocks is not a synonym for “left behind.” But a growing number of students are blindly using the thesaurus, or Rogeting, trying mask plagiarism. And it’s not working. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Thesaurus Plagiarizing”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
There is a wonderful new word making the rounds in linguistic circles these days, and it is rogeeing.
Rogeeing, like the thesaurus fellow.
Exactly, with a capital R, R-O-G-E-T-I-N-G.
And it’s defined as disguising plagiarism by substituting synonyms one word at a time with no attempt to understand either the source or the target text.
Oh, yes, yes.
It’s wonderful.
It’s the creation of a guy named Chris Sadler, who’s a lecturer at Middlesex University, and he was left scratching his head over some student papers.
He teaches business information systems.
He came across, for example, a line in a student paper that went like this. Common mature musicians and recent liturgy providers are looking to satisfy Herculean personalized liturgies.
I don’t know. What do they mean?
Well, I mean, clearly they’re right-clicking and using their thesaurus.
Yeah, and just like popping any old word in without thinking about it.
Right. So for mature musicians, that was big players, and recent liturgy providers was new service providers.
My favorite, however, is the phrase sinister buttocks. Apparently that showed up in a student paper.
Oh, instead of, what was it, left behind?
Yes.
Yes.
And I’ve seen similar. There’s an anecdote that I don’t remember where I picked it up about the kid who’s talked about for the weekend that he corroded a pizza because he went to the dictionary and decided the word eat wasn’t fancy enough and corrode is a synonym of eat.
And then there’s an episode of Friends where Joey’s write a recommendation letter and Joey’s supposed to say they’re warm, nice people with big hearts.
But instead he decides to fancy it up with a thesaurus.
And he writes, they’re human prepossessing homo sapiens with full-sized aortic pumps.
And this is a problem.
The misuse of the thesaurus is well known.
It is part of the beginning of advice for all writers, which is never use a word from a thesaurus unless you already know it.
Exactly.
The thesaurus should remind you of a word you know, not offer you a word you’ve never heard of.
Exactly. And of course, students shouldn’t be plagiarizing in the first place, but they might get caught if they use a thesaurus, right?
Unfortunately, it’s not just students. It happens in the business world as well.
That’s a good point. Yeah.
Well, this is the place to talk about all kinds of language.
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