| 词组 | flaunt, flout |
| 释义 | flaunt, flout A letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle in 1932 noted "the curious new error of confusing 'flaunt' with flout": • This new error, which I am informed is sweeping the country, is one more indication that we Americans are growing less and less language minded. Is this growth due to the machine age? —letter, San Francisco Chronicle, 25 June 1932 This is the first record we have of anyone objecting to this "curious new error." Our earliest evidence of the error itself is from 1918: • They flaunt his every title to affection or respect — Yale Rev., October 1918 Further evidence turned up sporadically in the 1920s and 1930s, but we began to see this use of flaunt frequently only in the late 1940s. This is one issue about which there is no dissent among usage commentators. All of them regard the use of flaunt to mean "flout" as nothing less than an ignorant mistake. Many of them also note with dismay or astonishment that this ignorant mistake is extremely common, and that it occurs even among the well-educated (Partridge 1942 even candidly admits to having made it himself). Nowhere is there the least suggestion, however, that its common occurrence among the highly educated makes it at all defensible. Even those commentators who are relatively liberal in other matters take a hard line when it comes to flaunt and flout. Flaunt in its approved senses can mean "to display oneself to public notice," "to wave showily," and especially "to display ostentatiously": • ... some books that flaunt a brand name are doing little more than beckoning to a market —Hugh Kenner, Harper's, March 1984 • ... to allow a minority to openly flaunt its differences with the rest of society —Houston Post, 16 Sept. 1984 Flout means "to treat with contemptuous disregard": • ... is crushed by the conventions she flouts —Robert Pattison, On Literacy, 1982 • ... many of them flout the rules on amateurism — Bob Ottum, Sports Illustrated, 6 Feb. 1984 Both words are used to describe open, unashamed behavior, and both typically suggest disapproval of such behavior. They are, in fact, used in such similar ways that they go together easily in a single sentence: • They are secure enough in their womanhood to neither flaunt it (like a starlet) nor flout it (like some feminists) —People, 3 Jan. 1983 • ... a young woman notoriously wild, flaunting her sexual power, flouting the decorum deemed fitting a maiden queen —Maureen Quilligan, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 3 Apr. 1983 Add to this similarity of use the obvious similarity of the words themselves, and you have a situation ripe for confusion. It is an oversimplification, however, to say that the use of flaunt to mean "to treat with contemptuous disregard" is merely the result of confusion. Certainly this sense originated from confusion of flaunt with flout, but those who now use it do so not because they are confused—they do so because they have heard and seen it so often that its use seems natural and idiomatic. They use it, in other words, because they are familiar with it as an established sense of flaunt: • They observed with horror the flaunting of their authority —Marchette Chute, Shakespeare of London, 1949 • ... she flaunted the rules, was continually reprimanded —Louis Untermeyer, Saturday Rev., 7 June 1969 • ... burning-out with drugs, daring authority, flaunting tradition —Edwin S. Shneidman, Psychology Today, June 1971 • ... whose code of respectability he flaunts or violates —Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others, 1975 • ... the impulse ... to flaunt the taboos of the tribe —O. B. Hardison, Jr., Entering the Maze, 1981 No one can deny that this sense of flaunt is now alive and well, despite its lowly origins. Nevertheless, the notoriety of flaunt used for flout is so great, and the belief that it is simply an error is so deep-seated and persistent, that we think you well-advised to avoid it, at least when writing for publication. Its occurrence in a published work is almost certain to draw criticism (assuming that it gets past the eye of the copy editor). If you use it in casual speech, open criticism is less likely—if only because most people are not that rude—but you do run the risk of giving some of your listeners the mistaken impression that they are smarter than you are. Nor do we recommend that you use flout to mean "to display ostentatiously; flaunt." Such usage does turn up in print on occasion: • "I think the flouting of indecent and offensive displays ... should be curtailed" —Patrick Cormack, quoted in Express & Star (Wolverhampton, Eng.), 8 June 1974 • The Ku Klux Klan ... is openly flouting its racial hatred —Julian Bond, letter, 1981 But it is extremely uncommon and can only be regarded as a genuine error. See also mitigate. |
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