I’m bored and remember these being fun. You can PM or email your secret to be posted without any identifying information. Email is omegaglory2 @ gmail. The pm/email will be deleted right afterward.
Past threads - https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=831018&highlight=secret+thread
I don’t trust gmail, but that’s no secret.
Oh, I hope people take you up on your offer! The secret threads aren’t just good for a glimpse into the lives of others; some of them had some darn good advice.
Sadly, no one wanted to share anything. Maybe another secret thread might take off later.
eh, give it a little time.
Yeah, bump this one up in a couple of weeks once the dust from the holidays has settled.
Listen do you want to know a secret
Do you promise not to tell woh woh woh closer
Let me whisper in your ear
Say the words you long to hear
I’m in love with you
I’m flattered, really, but it doesn’t do me much good if I don’t know who sent it in.
Ok, I’ll be the first.
I plagiarized a college term paper and got away with it.
Some years ago, after being lazy and not even starting a term paper until the night before it was due (yeah, we’ve all been there but I was old enough to know better), I remembered that I had written a term paper on basically the same topic years earlier when I was taking a similar course as part of a previous degree at another university. I still had it in my files so I basically just re-used it.
I typed it up from the old printed copy that I had, tweaking a few phrases to make it answer the new question instead of the old one and tossing in a few more updated references to things that had been published more recently.
There was a small risk that I would get caught since universities now have those plagiarism databases that they run all the papers through to identify any match to existing material, whether published or submitted as a paper at other universities. However, at the time I submitted the paper the first time, those databases didn’t exist yet and I knew the department would only have kept their copy of my original paper for about 3 years so it was highly likely the original was already destroyed by the time that university started scanning its papers into the plagiarism database. And, obviously, since it was a different university, no one at the new university would have known unless it got flagged on the database.
Although I was really just plagiarizing myself anyway, that still counts and is considered just as serious as plagiarizing someone else. I would have failed the course and likely been kicked out of the university. But I took the chance anyway and it worked in my favor. I got a decent grade for it and it evidently didn’t set off the Plagiarized flags.
While in high school a friend of mine and I acquired a key to a lock
that allowed us access to the underground utility service tunnels and
other spaces. We visited a few times late at night. On one occasion we
found another set of keys. These, we “discovered,” provided access to
a few above ground buildings and classrooms.
One of those classrooms was my English teacher. We rummaged through
her desk and found a copy of the final exam. My friend used it to good
advantage. I enjoyed English, and my teacher, so I didn’t really need
it (or use it) to get an acceptable grade in the class.
We had access to many forbidden areas, including the entire
underground of the adjacent Junior College. We could have been majorly
evil, but as someone must have said, “If you know you can do it, do
you really care if you do?” Our answer was no.
I masturbate - there - it’s out
So to speak…
I’m surprised that that’s actually plagiarism. What if two professors years apart assigned you the identical question? How could you do something different?
I did a report on Charles Goodyear in elementary school. Whenever I had to do an oral or written report on a famous figures from then through high school, I’d choose him. I’d add stuff every time but it would essentially be the same thing based on this one Reader’s Digest article.
Plagiarism: the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.
^Re-submitting a paper one previously submitted for credit in another course is an academic infraction in any university I’ve been a part of. Here, for instance, is the first hit I got on google, from McGill. (Hi, Hari!)
If you google self-plagiarism, there’s a whole bunch of websites discussing this issue as well as plagiarism policies from various universities concerning self-plagiarism or re-using work that was previously submitted for a different class. From my understanding, it seems to fall under plagiarism in an academic context or at the very least academic dishonesty. My university also had a policy like this that said you couldn’t re-use work for multiple classes.
A separate but related issue is that of using your own previously published work without citing it properly. As that particular secret confessor only mentions term papers, it sounds as though it wasn’t published or anything so they would just be re-using their own work, largely verbatim from the original paper from the sounds of it.
Looking through a few plagiarism policies, it appears that a student who is wanting to re-use their own work needs to cite it properly (how you’d cite your own term paper exactly, I have no idea) and probably also clear it with the professor/s in question. Essentially the issue is that you are expected to be submitting original, unique work of your own every time so it’s unethical to submit the same stuff over again.
One would think it would be generally pretty rare that anyone would actually have occasion to be able to re-use previous work but I suppose since most universities have courses that cover similar if not more or less identical material, especially at the undergrad level (which is what this sounds like to me), I guess it’s possible. And if the course is similar, it’s fairly likely similar term paper questions might be assigned. The confessor did say they changed the paper a little to meet the new question, so I guess it was a similar but not identical question on the same general topic or something like that.
In my experience as well, nobody really cares about proper citation at the elementary or high school level. Every elementary school kid in my day just lifted portions straight out of encyclopedias to do their reports. When I was in high school, I took large portions straight out of books as (properly cited) quotes instead of paraphrasing like you’re supposed to. But at the college level, it’s definitely expected that you do original work and cite your sources properly.
This isn’t exactly a secret. I’ve told my whole family, but don’t advertise it publicly.
A doctor in his mid-30’s took a DNA test a few years ago-as a hobby not because he wondered why he didn’t look like his dad. His DNA results were confusing and led him on a detective hunt, using message boards, on-line DNA results and family trees. It required much work and skill for him to unravel his mystery. Finally he sent me an e-mail last year asking if we might be related. There is no country that we’d both ever lived in!
DNA testing confirmed what I already knew from the details he had provided: I have a son that I’d known nothing about. We’ve become friends; there are surprising similarities in our philosophies, temperaments and interests. On opposite sides of the world, we’ve not met in person yet, but that may change soon.
In the fifth grade I would masturbate in public places. In department stores, huddled against racks of clothes, pretending to look through them. In the stacks of the public library, pretending to read a book. Underneath my desk at school. I would reach into my pants and touch myself, usually to a silent climax. I had discovered that it felt good so I kept doing it. I don’t think anyone ever noticed but I have a vague memory of sitting in class, playing with myself under the desk and realizing that everyone was watching me in disgust. To this day I’m still not sure if it was just a dream or if it really happened.
My brother is a drunk. On the outside he seems very successful. Good looking, married, 2 little kids (girl and a boy), very lucrative career in finance, highly intelligent, owns a home.
But we were both abused by our parents growing up. We dealt with it our own way. He dealt with it by obsessing over his career and becoming a drunk.
He recently went to a doctor who said that 20 years of heavy alcoholism has really damaged his liver. He already has signs of jaundice. He does very stupid things when he is drunk, stuff that could really mess up his life.
It hurts because I know he wants to die and I can’t help. I think his plan is to make a ton of money so his kids will be taken care of, then drink himself to death because of how miserable he is. Once he knows his kids will have enough money to survive without him, I think he’ll turn up the alcoholism until it kills him young.
I love him, and it hurts to watch. I wish there was an easy answer. One night I was talking to him about his alcoholism, and discussing various treatments he could try. He told me flat out he doesn’t want treatment because alcohol is the only thing that makes him happy.
I get to watch someone I love crash his car into a wall in slow motion while I watch.
Another one that isn’t really a state secret but isn’t freely shared.
When I was a child my mom told me that my father had died in an automobile accident while I was still an infant. The explanation was understandably brief, as one doesn’t necessarily want to burden a five-year-old with too many details.
As the years went on my mom occasionally shared little additional bits and pieces of what happened. By the time I was a teenager, I had learned that they had already began divorce proceedings, and they had been fighting on the day he died.
Later on she mentioned that she wasn’t in the accident–they were already separated and he had stormed out during the fight and gotten in an accident, understandable if one is in an altered state of mind. And finally, well into my forties, she mentioned that he had been drinking that night.
But then some time later I was talking with her on the phone when the subject came up and she casually mentioned something that freaked me out: “And then there was that family he killed in the station wagen.”
?!?What?!?
I did my best to not let her notice my shock, but once we were off the phone I began furious research. I immediately began signing up for free trial accounts on websites like Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com and searched using the official stats from his death certificate as a starting point. After a couple of days I found it: several articles from regional papers telling of a nighttime tragedy.
It seems that after the fight he left the house in a drunken rage heading back to his place. He struck a car driven by a single college-aged girl, killing her. The girl’s car then struck a third car that had a young family of four in it, killing the young mother in the passenger seat.
So, yes, my father was that asshole who gets drunk and kills people on the road, except he didn’t survive either. Three people died that night.
I never did find any details about the first girl other than where she was born. I was able to find details about the young mother though. I eventually found articles from the early 1970s showing both daughters involved in various school sports, so I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that at least the daughters survived. It occured to me that I could try to find them, to apologize on behalf of my father, but I can’t think of a single reason why this would be a good thing and all kinds of reasons why this would be a bad thing.
I eventually found a photo of the mother’s grave marker on a website where volunteers photograph grave markers and register them for loved ones to be able to find.
When I eventually asked my mom about it, she filled in a few details, but she has forgotten much. It is not difficult for me to understand how my father’s family completely cut off relations with my mom though, regardless of who was to blame–there was plenty of bad news and strong emotions going around at that moment several decades ago.
And it is understandable that I don’t allow alcohol in my own home. Not a drop. Whether my daughter drinks or not is her own business, but not in my home.
I stumbled upon my wife pleasuring herself in the bathtub a few months ago. She doesn’t know I saw her. I wasn’t spying on her; she didn’t close the door to the bathroom completely. When I realized what was happening, I moved along and let her have her privacy.
Rationally, I know we all do it, but it is one thing to know that in the general sense; it’s another to have an idea where/when it happens.
We are well into middle age, M/F, in case it isn’t clear from the context, have been a couple since the early 80s, and we have a really fulfilling sex life, so I don’t feel that it is taking anything away from us as a couple. But every time she goes upstairs to have a bath (which she does on the majority of evenings), I wonder whether she is or isn’t on that particular occasion. She often comments how much a bath before bed relaxes her. I’m sure it does! 
I thought about whether I should tell her I saw her, but don’t want to make her self-conscious. I’ll keep it to myself and let her have her fun. But I’m moderately jealous. With the passage of time, I have to, uh, save myself up for us, if you follow. She, of course, does not.