My state legislature passed a law affecting powers of attorney, and included a form document in the statute. The new law mandates that banks must accept the new statutory form.
When I asked my lawyer if she recommended that I get a new durable power of attorney, she wrote back: “Because not all banks previously accepted lawyer-drafted powers of attorney and wanted to use their own forms, I tell everyone to use the new statuary form to avoid any future problems.”
Hmm. She recommended a “statuary power of attorney.” What a novel idea, a legal document etched in stone. That truly would be a “durable” power of attorney.
My Bad!
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Merriam-Webster has an online definition for the term “statuary”.
The ‘Lectric Law Library discusses Powers of Attorney and, in particular, “durable” powers of attorney.
Two business owners had a disagreement as to how one of them was handling the company’s finances. In a meeting to review the transactions, the lawyer for the accused owner gave me a a stack of papers.
As I was looking through the documents, I noticed that there were two copies of the same invoice, so I handed one back to the other lawyer stating: “I am giving you this one back because it is duplicitous.”
“Thank you,” replied the other, “but surely you mean that this document is duplicative.”
“No,” I said, “I think that document is meant to deceive.”
My bad!
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This writer has been in more than one meeting in which a lawyer, in speaking about his client, inadvertently used the word “duplicitous” when he meant to say “duplicative”. Oops!
In a post on the Care2 website, Ann Pietrangelo discusses what she calls McDonalds’ “duplicitous approach to marketing directed to children” by giving away toys based upon popular movie characters.
On June 12, Ryan Alexander wrote on the U.S. News and World Report website that a new legislative proposal to give the President the power to force “Congress [to] reconsider spending requests that the White House considers wasteful or duplicative,” offers up a line-item veto that does not suffer the same problems as the 1996 line item veto law which the Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional.
My lawyer, Cheryl Darrow, was helping me to negotiate an important contract. When I saw the draft she had given to my opponent, I noticed that she inadvertently had given away all of my rights by mistakenly writing in someone else’s name instead of mine.
I pointed this out to Cheryl and she said she would fix it. However, the next draft contract still had someone else’s name. Frustrated with this, I sent Cheryl a red lined version of the contract with the name correction, but the third draft she sent to my opponent still had the name of an unknown third party.
So I sent Cheryl an email addressing this, to which she sent an explosive reply: “Why are you so upset about a little typo!”
I use Cheryl Darrow’s services because she is cheap.
My Bad!
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The names have been changed in this true story to protect the imprudent.
Such substantive error as the one discussed above is generally not considered a typo. Wikipedia has a good discussion of the meaning of the terms “Typo” and “Typographical Error”.
For a tool to intentionally generate typographical errors to be used in an Adwords campaign, click HERE.
For a discussion of the so-called “Wicked Bible” which, due to a word omission by the typesetter, included “Thou shalt commit adultery” as one of the Ten Commandments, click HERE.
“Cheryl Darrow” is a fictitious name for a fictitious person.