My hunch is there's a sizable chunk of people who don't really grasp what plagiarism is or why it's wrong, and they kind of regard Twitter and social media as this giant free-for-all where everybody's just constantly taking and posting whatever they want from whoever they want. A perfect example of that might be this Business Insider piece about the infectious spread of the Oh Hi Becky tweet, which quotes the author of the infamous jape:

Oh - right, I stole that guy's words and passed them off as my own. Well, no one really owns words, do they? Won't the world be better off when we lose these antiquated notions of originality and just celebrate the fact that a thought or joke or sentence exists in the first place? SMH. Anyway, it's a piece about how a tweet flowered and spread like kudzu, until the original author was accused of plagiarizing it. Warning: F-bomb, because of course you have to use the F-bomb these days. It's only a matter of time before "Effbom" is in the top ten baby names.

Related: an English school sent parents a letter about how their kids are not mere results on a test score. Which came as a surprise to parents, I'm sure. What? My kid can draw and dance? I had no idea. The letter , got upworthied all over kingdom come because it warmed hearts, although not to the point where normal muscular activity ceases due to excessive temperatures. Buzzfeed notes:

I googled the text to see where it showed up originally, and was treated to a cavalcade of British newspaper names. These are great.

Leighton Buzzard

Belper News

Spalding Guardian

Haverhill Echo

Worksop Guardian

Morpeth Herald

Harrogate Advertiser

Matlock Mercury

Peterlee Star

Pontefract and Castleford Express

Biggleswade Today

Hebden Bridge Times

Filey and Hunmanby Mercury

Malton and Pickering Mercury

Rye and Battle Observer

And that's just a few. Makes you wonder what names the paper rejected before it settled on Buzzard.

APPS In case you'd forgotten what you were doing years ago, Daily Dot has this:

Apps like this remind you how it's tough it would be to explain modern amusements to people in 1950. So, it's like, every morning you get a letter -

"Every morning? The mail comes at noon. Is that close enough?"

Yes. Every morning you get a letter from the service, and -

"What's the service?"

Well, it's a . . . business, I suppose, that sends you a photo you took a few months or years ago.

"How do they have my pictures?"

They don't. They take them from the other serv- the other business that does have your pictures.

"Why do they have my pictures?"

You gave them the pictures, so other people could see them.

"Why don't they just come over and we'll get out the slide projector and put up the screen?"

It's a . . . different sort of sharing. Everyone who follows you can see the pictures.

"Do they follow me because I'm going to the place where the pictures are?"

No. The pictures just appear on your hand-held computer screen. Anyway, the service sends you one every day to remind you what you were doing a while ago.

"Why?"

Well, to remind you that . . . no, to reacquaint you with your past, and . . . you know, that's a good question.

"You called it a business. How do they make money?"

Aaaaand that's another good one.