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I was going back over\xa0yesterday\u2019s post, and something sounded familiar about this paragraph:

A very careless plagiarist takes someone else\u2019s work and copies it verbatim: \u201cThe mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell\u201d. A more careful plagiarist takes the work and changes a few words around: \u201cThe mitochondria is the energy dynamo of the cell\u201d. A plagiarist who is more careful still changes the entire sentence structure: \u201cIn cells, mitochondria are the energy dynamos\u201d. The most careful plagiarists change everything except the underlying concept, which they grasp at so deep a level that they can put it in whatever words they want \u2013 at which point it is no longer called plagiarism.

After rereading it a few times, it hit me. A few days ago, I\u2019d come across this quote from Miss Manners:

There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating.

I laughed at it, I thought it was great, and I stored it in my head as the sort of thing I should quote at some point in order to sound witty.

And although I wasn\u2019t consciously thinking about it at the time, I\u2019m\xa0sure\xa0the last sentence of my paragraph comes from the last sentence of Miss Manners\u2019. It would be easy to dismiss it as a coincidence, it probably seems like a coincidence to\xa0you, I can\u2019t explain how I know that the one comes from the other, but when I replay in my mind the process that made me write that, it\u2019s obvious that it did.