"With modern medication, you can live to regret it!"

I’m copyrighting this now. Nobody in the future can take it! It is now officially mine. I’ll probably put it up on this site somewhere at some point, but until then, this is a safety post. You can’t take it. I mean you, reader. Not me if I happened to be reading it, though, because it’s mine! *evil laugh*

*ahem*

So, anyways, how it came up is this: We were at the school play and one of my friends was a fortune teller. So she read my palm. Beforehand I went, "She’ll probably tell me I’ll live for thirty seconds." And she did. And my friend goes,

"Well, I bet I’ll be able to live…"

"To regret it?" I say. "With modern medication, you CAN live to regret it!"

And thus the spiffy slogan was born. Now that it’s here, it’s mine and nobody can take it like they do for silly English papers. I’m a cited source, take that! I do feel that the whole plagiarism rush is very silly, and the fact that you have to know exactly where you got information even if you got it from your brain ridiculous.

I had placed Murphy’s Law into my English paper, quoted and stated that Murphy said it. I was asked to put parenthetical citation into the document for what source I received this knowledge from. But there was no book - I knew the law from my father. How can I cite my father? I can’t, he’s not a valid source of information! People are definitely the worst sources of information, because people most definitely do not write books, which are considered a better source.  So what else am I expected to be told than "Go to Google, look up a site, and cite that." I was told to cite for the sake of citing. I think I’d rather cite myself on this site.

I’ll stick Murphy’s Law here so that I can cite it in my paper:

Major Edward A. Murphy stated this: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."

Now I can cite myself. Silly plagiarism-crazy people. I can understand ideas, but for common terms like Murphy’s Law I couldn’t imagine why it’s not commonly known enough that I would know it and that the reader would know it. And even if they didn’t, it’s the reader’s fault for not knowing. I said Murphy stated it, and that he did - therefore, it is cited through Murphy. Murphy, the very person, is my source. But I can’t cite him because he’s a person - he probably didn’t say it unless some crackpots wrote it down in a book!

So how do we truly know who said anything if we can’t cite the original person? (By the way, that’s rhetorical. And I’ll leave you hanging on that note.)