Letters to the Editor
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To plagiarise is to take and use the thoughts, writings, inventions etc. as one's own.
That's one of the reasons people use inverted commas to signify quotation but this would be difficult in speech although some people use hand-motions to indicate quotation. If Senator Obama as cribed his scintillating words to Deval Patrick, it would be straightforward but there's something slippery about this. Maybe Patrick and Obama regularly make
speeches to each other while more mundane people just chat. Si (accent missing) se puede - yes, it is possible. What about Puck's speech from "A Midsummer Night's Dream"? Wouldn't this sound enchanting in one of the Senator's effusions: "I'll put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes" so that his siren-call could be heard in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, the Gaza Strip and everywhere else that comes to mind.
This friend of Senator Obama is Governor of Massachusetts, apparently, and is very fond of expensive drapes (full attribution to Wikipedia). Perhaps he's keen on amateur dramatics and that would explain the lavish expenditure on curtain material. Stage curtains are quite voluminous and, if there are many curtain-calls, that could cause a lot of wear and tear on the fabric. Words are important but they're even more important when they're your own. To cull them from others looks shabby, especially when no recognition is given to the original author. Good-night all!