Bad Grammar on Purpose: Law & Order

In the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "Semi-Professional," good-old boy Judge Blakemore is questioned by Detectives Eames and Goren. Blakemore becomes more and more flustered at Eames' barrage of remorseless questions, which reveal that the judge is a philanderer--and not a particularly chivalrous one.

When Goren steps in with more questions, the judge pushes back. Standing, he declares:

"I find the tone of your questions completely gratuitous."

This is bad grammar--or actually, to be more exact, a bad vocabulary choice. A tone cannot be gratuitous. It can be wry or confident or sarcastic or dry.

Not gratuitous. Gratuitous means "extremely uncalled for" or "unwanted." Questions can be gratuitous. Just not tone.

Not the villain, but the episode has

Law & Order alum, Bruce MacVittie.

Adorable actor!

To be fair, "uncalled for/unwanted questions" is what the judge means ("I am offended by your sardonic tone and your gratuitous questions"). But the language here is not a mistake on the part of the script-writers.

The judge is an intellectual lightweight. He has a devoted assistant with whom he has been having an affair since she started working for him. She has been writing and publishing legal articles in his name for years. The articles,  about intellectual property rights, are intelligent, erudite, and precise.

She would never refer to a "tone" as "gratuitous."

Consequently, when Goren and Eames discover the truth about the articles, we, the audience, are not surprised.

The episode plays more games with language. The villain--who wanted the judge's plagiarism revealed--is a writer himself. He wrote several novels in which he used Judge Blakemore as a character. Despite changing the judge's name, Goren and Eames easily recognize that the villain has been trying to "get" Blakemore for years--

And yeah, "blake" as in "blank" is also deliberate.