Intellectual Phrogging: When Someone Moves Into Your Ideas and Makes You the Intruder

Intellectual Phrogging names a pattern that ordinary plagiarism does not fully describe: the sustained and insufficiently disclosed inhabitation of another person's distinctive conceptual architecture until the borrower becomes more recognizable than the thinker from whom the architecture came. J.C. Howard defines the proposed construct, distinguishes it from cryptomnesia, idea appropriation, knowledge theft, epistemic injustice, and halo/horn effects, and introduces Strategic Intellectual Phrogging for cases in which borrowed thought is also used to control access, interpretation, and authority around the originator. Psychological and organizational research substantiates the component mechanisms; it does not yet validate the compound construct as a scientific scale or diagnosis. Independent interdisciplinary essay; not peer reviewed.