LANGUAGE CORNER
Flaunt/Flout
A Couple of 'F' Words
The word below beginning with “f” was spelled right, and that’s all the editor — your correspondent — noticed:
“As Tom Brokaw is sufficiently savvy to know this rule, his ostensible flaunting of it ...”
To flaunt is to show (something) off — She flaunted her new Porsche — and it wasn’t the right word or even related to the right one. To flout, on the other hand, is to violate, defy, thumb one’s nose at — He flouted the regulations daily and was never caught.
The writer, whose slip is more defensible than the editor’s, obviously meant Brokaw was flouting, not flaunting, the rule in question.
