Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I didn’t see evidence of this one in the database, and I’m not even sure it qualifies.
A comment thread at the Constitutional Law blog Balkinization is the source of the in-the-wild instance that spurred this post , as follows:
...you have to have lost your grip on reality to think our social compact permits this, or to think it is beneficial public policy.
I’d always understood the term to have originated with Rousseau’s 1762 treatise The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right (Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique). However, a Google search suggests that the “compact” variant has been used interchangeably for a good while. I am not schooled in French, so I’m not sure if the French “contrat” could be translated as the English noun “compact”... but I suspect not.
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Welcome to the forum, JustDerek.
The OED’s first definition for “compact” is this:
A covenant or contract made between two or more persons or parties
The quotation underscores the fact that compact and contract are near-synonyms in in some contexts. And that’s why I wouldn’t call this an eggcorn—an eggcorn requires a significant change of imagery underpinning the word or phrase, but here we still have the basic idea of an agreement of some kind.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2009-12-06 13:46:05)
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Yeah, I guess this one was cutting it too fine. I couldn’t get past the way that the “compact” construction changes the title of Rousseau’s work, but that doesn’t make it an eggcorn.
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