Don’t flaunt your ignorance
Here’s another pair of words where one is regularly confused for the other: flaunt and flout. Both are spelt similarly, and both imply a lack of concern for others’ feelings, but that’s where the similarity ends.
Flaunt means to show off something or to make a big show of taking pride in it. So you can flaunt your wealth (wear flashy clothes, spend money on expensive things that you then quickly discard) or flaunt your ignorance (make your lack of knowledge a point of pride, keep referring to “school of hard knocks” and “university of life”).
Flout means to deliberately disregard a rule, law or convention. So if you flout social norms, you make a conscious choice to do things that go against them.
Above all, never talk about “flaunting the rules” – it’s nonsense.
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