Plagiarism is unfortunate. No, seriously. The fine line between “plagiarism” and “creative research techniques” hits you at two in the morning while you’re staring at the third page of your eight-page research paper wondering whether to insert a footnote or just let that last sentence go.

Does writing “the battle occurred in 1865” instead of “they battled in 1865” get you off the hook? How many different ways are there to say “Emile Durkheim was born in 1858?” If you lift a couple nicely worded phrases from the Encyclopedia Britannica, will anyone really notice?

Ask Bob Dylan.

Well, try asking Bob Dylan. He’s kind of a reclusive guy. Or maybe ask his publicist — although he’s been hard to reach lately, too.

You see, Modern Times — Bob Dylan’s first album in five years and first Number One album in 30 years — was released recently. A few people noticed that some of the phrases in the lyrics weren’t actually written by Dylan, as the meager liner notes inaccurately claim.

This isn’t the first time Dylan has been accused of this sort of thing, but then, a “few people” meant something very different back in 1961 in those dark days before the Internet. In 2006, a “few people” means blogs and forum flame wars and write-ups in The New York Times.

Have you heard of Henry Timrod? Well, now you have. Timrod was a civil war poet from the 19th century who Dylan may or may not have read – but if he did, every one of those words certainly rang true to him, enough so that he “borrowed” them in his new album.

This is where the debate starts to glow like burning coal. Did Dylan steal? Is he just making a really, really obscure allusion? Are the four phrases that quote lines from Timrod’s poetry intentionally stolen, or were the words just so embedded in Dylan’s mind that he couldn’t tell they weren’t his anymore? Did I purposely plagiarize Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” a few sentences ago or were those my words that just happened to be ironically similar to Dylan’s? Did you even notice? Does it even matter?

The whole thing started because a disc jockey posted his suspicions on an internet forum and fans started to go nuts — according to The Times, one called Dylan a “thieving little swine” and another one declared “if it was anyone else we’d be stringing them up by their neck, but no, it’s Bobby Dee, and ‘the folk process.'”

I mean — no. No, he isn’t a thief, and no, we wouldn’t be stringing anyone else up by their neck. People only noticed in the first place because it’s Bob Dylan — because he really is that high profile and people really do care that much. If musician Kaye Irvine borrowed her entire next album from poet Geri Digiorno you would not care or notice — unless you also happen to be from my small town in Northern California, which you’re not.

Borrowing happens all the time. Borrowing makes you a better writer. Everyone is making noise about how it’s part of the folk tradition, it’s allowed, he’s — as Boston University Professor Christopher Ricks put it in The Times’ article Sept. 14 — “drawing on his predecessors” which is the “sign of a great artist.”

This may or may not be true, and Timrod may or may not deserve credit on an ethical, not legal level since the copyright has long expired — but all of that is really not the issue.

No, the issue and the thing that’s irksome about the whole scandal is not that Dylan borrowed some lines from Timrod — which is probably the best thing to happen to Timrod since the Battle of Chickamauga — it’s the fact that he did so sloppily.

Using four phrases from one poet on one album without giving credit is plagiarism by definition, but it’s also beside the point. It’s excessive. Whatever happened to subtlety? If Dylan copied the lines knowingly, he has massively underestimated his fans’ intelligence and their emotional attachment to his work and to his character.

If the similarities were unintentional, then he needs a copy editor who is at least as thorough as his fan base.

If Dylan were trying to “revitalize” Timrod, I feel like we would be able to tell that those were his intentions. Dylan is not revitalizing; he’s recycling. And it’s a shame. There are so many words in the English language. There are so many unheard metaphors, so many unimagined images, so many unsaid phrases.

Any casual fan of Dylan knows that he does not need to borrow. But if Dylan doesn’t know that — well, then that’s truly unfortunate.

Megan Steffan, a sophomore in the University Professors’ Program, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at [email protected].