In 1848, English poet Arthur Hugh Clough named a new work The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, apparently thinking this was an innocent Gaelic place name. The Literary Gazette informed him that it means “the hut of the bearded well” — it’s a Highland toast to the female genitalia.

“Red-faced and embarrassed, Clough was nevertheless ribald enough to giggle delightedly over the appallingly ludicrous way in which he had introduced such unseemliness into ‘all the drawing rooms and boudoirs (of course) of all the world,'” notes author Robindra Kumar Biswas.

On republishing the poem, Clough changed the name to the appropriately meaningless Tober-na-Vuolich.

The French constrained writing group Oulipo invented a new crime they call “plagiarism by anticipation.”

If William Shakespeare writes something, and you later write the same thing, then Shakespeare is guilty of plagiarism for anticipating your idea.

“Thus justice is done, and each is rewarded according to his merit.”

The opening of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford, “It was a dark and stormy night,” has been held up as a model of bad writing for nearly two centuries. But it’s also the opening sentence of Madeleine L’Engle’s award-winning 1962 young adult science fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time.

Apparently this was deliberate. L’Engle biographer Leonard Marcus writes, “With a wink to the reader, she chose for the opening line of A Wrinkle in Time, her most audaciously original work of fiction, that hoariest of clichés … L’Engle herself was certainly aware of the old warhorse’s literary provenance as … Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s much-maligned, much-parodied repository of Victorian purple prose, Paul Clifford.”

“To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.” — Max Beerbohm

“[These foolish remarks] show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.” — Oscar Wilde

In September 1835, Stendhal wrote on the shore of Lake Albano the initials of the women he had loved: Virginie Kubly, Angela Pietragrua, Adèle Rebuffel, Mina de Griesheim, Mélanie Guilbert, Angelina Bereyter, Alexandrine Daru, Angela Pietragrua, Matilde Dembowski, Clémentine Curial, Giulia Rinieri, and Madame Azur-Alberthe de Rubempré.

“I dreamed deeply of these names, and of the astonishing follies and stupidities they made me commit,” he wrote. “The habitual condition of my life is that of an unhappy lover.”

(From his unfinished autobiography The Life of Henry Brulard, 1890.)