Chinese Whispers

Remember that game Chinese Whispers? You whisper something into your neighbour’s ear; who whispers the same to his neighbour and so on. At the end, it can be very surprising how much (and how many times) the message got distorted.

Of course, Chinese Whispers isn’t limited to just games or spoken stuff. It happens in the real world even with printed material!

Way back in 1892 in an article titled “Imitators and Plagiarists”, W. H. Davenport Adams wrote about Tennyson’s tendency:

“… great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.”

But who decides whether the copier improved or not?

TS Eliot addressed the subjectivity of that question:

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal…The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.”

Leaving Eliot’s logic untouched, Marvin Magalaner did modify Eliot’s lines to refer to artists and borrowing:

“Immature artists borrow; mature artists steal.”

The theme continued and became very famous when Steve Jobs attributed a variant as having been said by Picasso:

“Good artists copy; great artists steal.”

I guess that would mean Apple sued Samsung because the latter was a good artist, not a great one!