If you’ve got it, flout it

That’s because the UN holds some very evil tenants.

I love an ostentatious boycott.

International politics is literally a doggie-dog world.

It’s hilarious when people use a homonym as a pose to the correct word!

They may all be funny, but flout-flaunt is the one I see most often in print. A lot in romance novels, where you have to imagine there have been editors involved. Sometimes I feel like in about 10 years nobody will remember the difference.

For some time now flaunt has been used in the sense “to show contempt for,” even by educated users of English. This usage is still widely seen as erroneous and is best avoided.

Don’t worry such common errors don’t last very long. Pretty soon it won’t be an error.

In my experience, these lapses at the BBC come in pigs and troughs.

re 11 and 13 – reminds me of an arch footnote by david wiggins, in which, after explaining a distinction rather nicer than those discussed here (‘such that’ vs ‘so that’, I think, but I cannot remember for sure), he says something like: ‘this is the kind of explanation which ten years ago one would not have had to offer, and ten years from now will be incomprehensible…’

A bit pompous, but the point hits home.
Still, the question I guess is: since there have always been people complaining about this sort of thing (eg 20-30 years ago it would have been Kingsley Amis writing to Larkin), should one really worry that it is getting worse? is there any evidence for that always tempting hypothesis?

mc @17:

I don’t think we should worry as long as there’s another good – not too long winded or obscure – way of expressing the idea that’s getting lost. In the original book of Common Prayer, the CoE prayed that the establishment should “truly and indifferently administer justice”. The loss of that meaning of “indifferent” was bearable, because the revised prayer book can use “Impartially”. Regretting the loss of early modern usage is a luxury like regretting the loss of Latin as the common language of scholarship.

If we lose the distinction of “so as/such as”, it becomes harder to express the idea signified by the one that’s lost. So the thought becomes more obscure, and that’s worth protesting.

Ground control to Mao Tse Tung….

Oh, cut the BBC copyeditors some slack. I’m sure they’re overworked and underpaid, just trying to eek out a living as best they can.

(I thought about trying to work in a riff on the misuse of “begs the question”, but so few people get that right that I was afraid people would think I meant it unironically.)

Sure, these distinctions will blur with time as language lives on.

For example, I have no idea what the mistake being pointed out in comment #22 is. Do pirates have something to do with using an equals sign instead of a hyphen?

mc: Yeah. I learned Latin and can spell. my baby sister didn’t and can’t spell her way out of a paper bag. She earns about twice what I do in the same industry. Yay spelling!

In the sixties I once read a column by an English-language ‘maven’ (was it Cleveland Amory?) who decried the hideous modern barbarism of militate against. Then I noticed this phrase in a Jane Austen novel, and concluded that columnists often don’t know what they’re talking about.

Ah, but garymar, now everyone says mitigate against. Which is only forgivable when there are militating circumstances.

As for Jane Austen, her use of a phrase certainly refutes the claim that it’s a “modern barbarism”; but I never quite understood the whole, “It must be legit because a great storyteller, or a character created by one, said it.” Using, say, Shakespeare as an arbiter of usage would just make things worser.

I tend to go in the opposite direction from Chris #19: rather than say, “Okay, we’re losing the distinctive meaning of ‘disinterested’ but now we have ‘unbiased’ as a tool to take its place,” I’d say, “Why do we need ‘disinterest’ to mean ‘indifference’ when we already have an elegant term for the condition in question?”

to insist that nevertheless they continue caring about spelling is getting close to rule-worship/snobbery/exclusivity/conformity for its own sake

*applauds*

I’d say, “Why do we need ‘disinterest’ to mean ‘indifference’ when we already have an elegant term for the condition in question?”

Who’s “we”? If you’re the only one left using it, exactly who are you impressing and/or enlightening? Would you prefer we still use bead in its original and hence “correct” sense of ‘prayer’? See above regarding rule-worship/snobbery/exclusivity/conformity for its own sake.

Mr. Ripley,

I know this thread is already dead, and you’ll probably never see this, but my reply to your #31 post is as follows:

Shakespeare is the god of English, Austen one of his angels.