Flaunting Proper Usage

I open the Washington Times to page five and am greeted by a full-page ad boldly declaring in red capitals:

OBAMA FLAUNTS THE CONSTITUTION.

Flaunt, To show off, display ostentatiously, as in, "if you've got it, flaunt it."

Hmm, so is it his lack of taste that our authors are up in arms over?

Possibly, but I suspect they were actually looking for 'flout', To show contempt for, to disregard.

Although the Random House Webster's College Dictionary canonizes the error (as they do for any sufficiently common mistake), Dictionary.com gets it right. As does almost every contemporary usage guide I can find: Paul Brians's Common Errors in English Usage, The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing. Even About.com correctly explains the difference. I needn't multiply examples when Google will do it for me.

One thing that is interesting though is an observation made at Motivated Grammar. The author there notes, taking a cue from the OED (which dates this error to 1923), that this confusion appears to have arisen quite abruptly around 1920, which abrupt rise he demostrated with the aid of Google Books.

I had to try for myself.

The first occurrence of 'flaunt the law', index in Google Books, is from 1905, in the Pacific Medical Journal. This is as opposed to the 99 indexed occurrence of 'flout the law' that occurred up till that year. The first occurrence of 'flaunt convention' is from 1915, as opposed to 29 occurrences with 'flout'.

I decided to chart the occurrences of the two forms of these two phrases--'~ the law' and '~ convention'--in 5 year periods. Then I decided to compare the frequency of the two forms in each period and to look at the change over time.

A couple of things need to be noted. First, the sample-size is very small in the initial years (the total number of occurrences in 1905-10 was only 32, it only broke 500 in 1965-68, and 1000 in 2000-04), thus there is a tremendous level of noise in the early periods. Second, nothing was done to keep one book from being double-counted; what was counted was the number of books in which the phrases in question appeared, not the number of times the phrases themselves appeared; a book could theoretically be counted 4 times. Moreover different editions of the same book could be counted as different books, possibly in different periods. Finally, it is known that some books counted as instances of the erroneous usage, which books were in fact using it to point out that it was an error, e.g., the Dictionary of Disagreeable English, The Dimwit's Dictionary, and others. Thus it is quite likely that the ratio for recent decades is skewed high. Further, it should go without saying that the sample is of published books, and does not attempt to represent spoken usage.

The resulting charts however are fascinating, and do not show the expected roughly exponential increase one would tend to expect, in the adoption of a phrase. We see a sharp decline in the period of '45-50. Followed by a sharp increase rounding out at around 24% in the second half of the 70s. This is followed by a slight drop-off.

It would be interesting to try to account for the peaks and troughs. Did WWII result in a larger percent of publications in the 40s being authored by professors as opposed to novelist and journalists? Did some popular style-guide lambaste the error in the 70s? Who knows. I leave that to my readers, to whom I also leave the task of pointing out the deficiencies of my statistical analysis.

While there are many questions left, a couple things can be stated with some certainty: The use of 'flaunt' meaning 'flout' (in published writing) can be traced to the early 20th century. It has never been used by a majority (in writing). Finally, it is fairly obvious that it is an error insofar as it is clear that the substitution is based on similarity of sound leading to a confusion of meaning, and not on some natural extension of meaning. Neither can it be credibly interpreted as an intentional figure of speech.

Anyway, while I can't place too much fault on the poor, confused author for his inarticulate expression of outrage at the president, I can recommend that, in general, if one runs a full page ad in a national newspaper that he have someone with a decent sense of the language review the proof.