*wail of anguish*

[lemurtanis]

Please, please, do not let your friends take a different tact. It's tack, which is something you do with your sailboat. To change course. Which is what the idiom's about.

One more way to prevent me from screaming at my monitor.

Thanks!

Comments

[portnoyslp]

Thank you for the tack-ful summary. :-)

[lemurtanis]

*reaches through the Internet to throttle Steve*

[dcltdw]

"Enh, I could care less".

Please don't shoot me; I need it for the people who say the above. :)

[lemurtanis]

I am still working on ways to avoid being bothered by that sort of thing. I'm just not there yet. And I'm surprised how often I've seen the tac(t/k) thing recently. I can't figure out a rationalization for "tact" in the above usage -- maybe if I could understand why the misuse occurs, it wouldn't bother me so much.

[dcltdw]

I don't think people are confused on meaning; they're confused on spelling.

No wait, I'm lying; the idiom I pointed out belies that theory.

Maybe it's just a black box? You just say "lets taek a different tact lol" without actually thinking about what you just wrote.

Out of curiosity, would you say you're really good at spelling? I tend to think of myself as being one of those people, which makes me wonder if that's what prompted my initial guess.

[lemurtanis]

I think of myself as a good speller, yes. Or a gud speeler?

Hmm, I hope it's not a black box. I want there to be reasons for things. I am aware that this makes me an idealist.

[chmrr]

Sounds like an eggcorn.

[lemurtanis]

What a fascinating link. That database does in fact have the tack->tact shift, and, like jedusor, it suggests that the use of the idiom in discussions of communication has caused the mental crossover.

Thanks for the pointer.

[jeffurrynpl]

Some of my students would lament that they didn't have the material "down packed."

[selinker]

It's a good thing you know the entomology of phrases like this.