tact » tack

Classification: English – final d/t-deletion

Spotted in the wild:

  • She has NO TACK. Seriously. She makes fun of her kids when they are going through puberty. (link)
  • I went and confused Seamus and myself. I don’t know how Fred does that so well. Oh well, he has no tack. Anyways, I found out who Seamus fancies I think. (link)
  • That said, if you do it and you get far enough, it couldn’t hurt your career! Just bear in mind that although Simon Cowell is brutally blunt sometimes… he is generally right. He just has no tack or manners! (link)

Using Google, “he|she has no tack” had only 46 ghits, while “he|she has no tact” only has 592 g ghits. I don’t see tact to be a common word to begin with, so that may be why there aren’t a lot of hits. Paul Pellerito made mention of “in tack” for “intact” in a commentary on this, and Brittany Hopkins mentioned “in tact” for “intact” in another commentary. I think that both suggest the confusion of “tack” with “tact”, as well as the usage of “tact” by itself. There’s also an entry on this site for the related eggcorn, “tack >> tact”.

| link | entered by David Romano, 2005/08/11 |

Commentaries

  1. 1

    Commentary by Carol Rutz , 2006/08/10 at 12:06 pm

    Tack for tact can work in other direction as well: “We need to take a different tact to solve this problem.” The misuse is ingenious in that tact as dipomacy is simultaneously conflated with tactic as strategy and tack as approach.

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