#502

i newspaper special, September 25, 2019

The past tense of ‘to spring’ is ‘sprang’. ‘Sprung’ is the past participle, used with versions of ‘have’: ‘the flower has/had/will have sprung.’ These things are not regular and I drew up a handy chart on here a while ago. I will try to dig it out. Meanwhile Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes:

From Style Matters:

flaunt/flout: To flaunt is to display ostentatiously; to flout is treat with contempt (usually in the sense of breaking rules). And:

Nice heading, but ruined by the usual ignorance about the natural world: ‘botanic’ refers to plants. The equivalent for animals would, I suppose, be ‘zoological’. I dare say the person who wrote the caption thinks this is pedantic. It isn’t.

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