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Hi, I’m Fox Tucker. I’m grammatically challenged.
When directed to the Fox Tucker Lawyers’ website, Folklaw was thrilled to find an infestation of grammatically incorrect sentences.
Felicity Nelson
It is a little difficult at times like these for Folklaw to contain its glee.
Folklaw could barely resist the temptation to pick apart the corporate PR-speak, phrase by phrase, to extract the most entertainment value from the site.
The “about” section on the home page reads: “Size and sphere. Quality, perspective and character. Hi, we’re Fox Tucker Lawyers. Allow us to introduce ourselves.”
Now, Folklaw is no grammar Nazi but stretching its mind back to school it seems to recall that sentences are made up of two parts; a subject, the thing itself, and the predicate, the thing that modifies the subject.
Strictly speaking, “Size and sphere [full stop]” does not have a predicate and therefore does not qualify as a sentence, neither does “Quality, perspective and character [full stop]”.
Folklaw wanted to ask Fox Tucker if it was aware that sentences have to follow a basic structure, but sadly the firm did not return its calls.
Folklaw also would have loved to know whether the adventurous, some would say improper use of English, was something that appealed to clients.
The linguistic treasures didn’t stop at the home page; in introducing the partners the site reads: “Partnership’s no given at Fox Tucker. Tenure’s not enough. Results must demand attention. Performance hold under pressure. Responsibility sit comfortably. Here are those who lead our team.”
Firstly, “Performance hold under pressure [full stop]” is barely a sentence and, even if it were, it would be the sort of pitiful sentence that attracts very angry red crosses from primary school teachers.
“Responsibility sit comfortably [full stop]” – ok, what? All jokes aside, that doesn’t make sense. Surely it should read, “Responsibility sit*s* comfortably”, if anything?
Secondly, the part that reads, “Tenure’s not enough [full stop] Results must demand attention [full stop]”, harbours such broken English that one wonders how any reasonable person could extract any meaning from it at all. Such constellations of grammatical gems are strewn all over the firm’s website.
Folklaw would assume Fox Tucker was playing a prank in the lead up to its merger with Donaldson Walsh, which Lawyers Weekly exclusively broke last week, if it hadn’t heard that members of the firm also cringe when clicking on Fox Tucker’s website...
Lawyers are notoriously conservative and change can only be a good thing, but maybe Fox Tucker took things a little too far by trying to modify the rules of written English?
