User:Michael95420

placeholder. Articles contemplated: [Michael95420/New Tack] -- english phrase meaning "go in a different direction" examples: "A Tough New Tack at Harvester." The New York Times. November 12, 1978. Smith, Gene. "Unions Taking a New Tack to Widen Support." Chicago Tribune. September 3, 2003. Von Bergen, Jane. sources: : Another way of looking at these things: if an expression originated, in a sensible way, as X, but now some subset of the people using the expression share a common misstatement of it as Y, conduct a study of 100 of them. Explain to each of them that the expression is supposed to be X, explain *why* it's X, and explain how Y is based on a misunderstanding. If more than some percent P of those people say, "Oh, I see, I was mishearing it" or "Oh, I see, I didn't know that" and seem to appreciate that X is correct, then call Y incorrect. If less than P percent of those people say that, and the rest say, "Well, this is how I've always heard it", then call Y correct. Choose P according to your whim.  It's a "mistake" in that the word tact doesn't actually mean what folks like Towery think it means. They've misheard an idiom, and being unfamiliar with one of its terms (tack, some kind of nautical thing), and reanalysed it according to a familar word. In time, this reformed idiom gets passed on to new speakers and they perpetuate the error. Some amount of error may also stem from the fact that many English speakers pronounce both as /t@k/, and so may not realise that there are two different words here.

In that their meaning is the same as the original idiom, this altered form could eventually become "correct" in time.