Blatant is for something wrong that is not even hiding. A blatant lie is not a clever lie; everyone can see it. A blatant foul, a blatant attempt to cheat — the bad thing sits out in the open, and the person doing it does not look ashamed. That shameless flavour is the heart of the word. You would not call a kindness blatant, and you would not use it for a secret you only found later. It is a critic’s word: news, arguments, complaints. Though actually, it has a strange start: in the 1500s the poet Edmund Spenser made up a monster called the Blatant Beast, a creature of ugly, loud talk. The “loud and shameless” feeling is still inside the word. Near it sits flagrant, which also means “openly bad”; blatant leans a little more toward “you are not even trying to hide this.”