One Too Many Documents?
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.