sweetheart deal
7
6.1
- noun
- /ˈswiːtˌhɑrt dɪl/
- Literature
:
trato preferencial
- The owner of the building gave me a sweetheart deal.
I hope he does not weaponize the IRS, which was going to give a secret sweetheart deal to Hunter Biden before a judge caught it.
- I hope he does not weaponize the IRS, which was going to give a secret sweetheart deal to Hunter Biden before a judge caught it.
- And this is a sweetheart deal that is being exposed, thankfully because of these divorce proceedings.
- He was tried sometime a while ago and received some very shady sweetheart deal that allowed him to serve his time.
- Now the borrowers, they're going to pay, they're not going to stop paying on these sweetheart deals.
Examples
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This group balks at sweetheart deals following massive corporate wrongdoing.
Academic text (2017) -
Could the Prime Minister explain the difference between a sweetheart deal and a gentleman's agreement?
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And is the same sweetheart deal on offer to every council facing the social care crisis created by her government?
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We really appreciate you offering us such a sweetheart deal.
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The energy sector needs to be competitive, ruled by market principles, not sweetheart deals.
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He tried to strike this sweetheart deal with the prosecutors in July.
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I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using taxpayer money.
Blog text (31) -
You made a sweetheart deal with Solstein Donagan to line your own pockets.
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Many leaders of the antismoking community complained it was a sweetheart deal for the industry because it prevented the FDA from regulating nicotine for a decade and granted the companies too much in liability protections.
Academic text (2007) -
The company offered a sweetheart deal to their loyal customers, ensuring they received the best prices.
Synonyms
A secret agreement that is dishonest or illegal
Antonyms
How Favorable
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun 'sweetheart' (someone beloved or treated specially) combined with 'deal' (an agreement) yields a plausible sense of an especially favorable agreement, so a learner who knows both words can often infer that meaning. However, the idiomatic nuance that it implies favoritism, secret arrangements, or unfair advantage is not fully predictable from the parts, making the expression only partially compositional for a B1 learner.
Etymology
Sweetheart deal comes from the idea of a sweetheart as 'a loved person' getting a special deal. One popular story says people imagined giving a loved person a much better bargain, so the phrase now means an agreement that is secretly or unfairly 'very favorable' to one side.