Kieran Healy takes the piss out of the BBC for mixing up “flout” and “flaunt.” My favorite instance of this was an NPR event hosted by Ken Andersen with Doug Rushkoff and some other panelists whose identity I’ve since forgotten, at which the program enthusiastically promised that the discussants would “flaunt conventional wisdom.” Call it unintentional truth in advertising.
Flaunt/Flout
March 17th, 2006 · 2 Comments
Tags: Language and Literature
2 responses so far ↓
1 Charles // Mar 19, 2006 at 3:17 am
I literally diead laughing.
2 J. Goard // Mar 21, 2006 at 6:59 am
The fact that such word pairs tend to be conflated when context is sufficient for distinguishing the meanings, is significant.