bad bargain
1
4.6
- noun
:
mal negocio
- "My father has sold me to you, but if you take me, you will make a bad bargain, seeing that I would rather offer myself to the passers-by than to you.
- made a bad bargain
- a very bad bargain
Why would you take a bad bargain in this case?
- Why would you take a bad bargain in this case?
- Alder says they want to be free, and then Sepal says maybe it was a bad bargain from the beginning.
Examples
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After realizing the repairs cost more than the car's value, she knew she had made a bad bargain.
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Why would you take a bad bargain in this case?
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But it is perhaps not such a bad bargain.
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It's a bad bargain if nobody gains.
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$30,000 in exchange for your old age is a very bad bargain.
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Should she protest that he'd made a bad bargain after all?
Fiction book (1999) -
Alder says they want to be free, and then Sepal says maybe it was a bad bargain from the beginning.
-
So once again, fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters are starting to wonder if they made a bad bargain.
Blog text (6) -
Investing in that project turned out to be a bad bargain when the returns were minimal.
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He regretted his decision to sign the contract; it was clearly a bad bargain for the services offered.
Synonyms
246
2.3
A choice or plan that will probably cause problems
54
2.4
A choice that is not good and causes problems later
11
3.5
A choice that is not wise and causes problems
A deal that seems good at first but is bad later
Antonyms
How Good
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a deal that results in an unfavorable outcome' is directly derivable from combining 'bad' (not good/unfavorable) with 'bargain' (deal), following a standard adjective + noun compositional pattern. This is a common and predictable construction cross-linguistically, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Bad bargain comes from old market scenes where a buyer thinks they got a great bargain but later finds the goods are poor or the price was unfair. That clear image of leaving the market feeling cheated explains why bad bargain means 'a deal that turns out badly'.