flaunt

verb

he flaunts his young wife as if she were the prize heifer at the county fair

Syn:

show off, display ostentatiously, make a (great) show of, put on show/display, parade; brag about, crow about, vaunt; informal flash

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flaunt, flout

Confusion about these terms is so distressingly common that some dictionaries have thrown in the towel and now treat flaunt as a synonym of flout. Flout means "contravene or disregard; treat with contempt." Flaunt means "show off or parade something in an ostentatious manner", but is often incorrectly used for flout, perhaps because it is misunderstood as a telescoped version of flout and taunt — e.g.: "In Washington, the White House issued a statement that deplored the Nigerian Government's ‘flaunting [read flouting] of even the most basic international norms and universal standards of human rights.’ " (New York Times; Nov. 11, 1995.)

Of course, flaunt is more often used correctly — e.g.: "He donates millions to religious and charitable groups, yet flaunts his own wealth." (Fortune; Aug. 18, 1997.) Flout, meanwhile, almost never causes a problem. Here it's correctly used: "A record rider turnout, fueled by the mayor's earlier pledge to end the escort and crack down on cyclists flouting traffic laws, poured into the streets on an improvised route." (San Francisco Examiner; Aug. 3, 1997.) But the rare mistake of misusing flout for flaunt does sometimes occur — e.g.: "Mr. Talton was soon joined by almost two dozen other conservative Republicans who filed en masse into the clerk's office to flout [read flaunt] their disapproval for their colleague and fellow party member." (Dallas Morning News; May 25, 2000.)

One federal appellate judge who misused flaunt for flout in a published opinion — only to be corrected by judges who later quoted him — appealed to Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, which accepts as standard any usage that can be documented with any frequency. The judge then attempted to justify his error and pledged to persist in it. Seeking refuge in a nonprescriptive dictionary, however, merely ignores the all-important distinction between formal contexts, in which strict standards of usage must apply, and informal contexts, in which venial faults of grammar or usage may, if we are lucky, go unnoticed (or unmentioned). — BG