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I'm from the West Coast, USA. I'm familiar with The Economist and find that their vocabulary selection trends toward words used in the Commonwealth. "Traduced"

I'm from the West Coast, USA. I'm familiar with The Economist and find that their vocabulary selection trends toward words used in the Commonwealth. "Traduced" is far more commonly used in the UK than in the US, if use in search terms is to be believed [1] I also enjoy learning new words, but the point of the article was how to communicate clearly, not how to enrich your readers' vocabularies. [1]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore/GEO_MAP/1617643200?hl=en-US&tz=240&q=traduced&sni=3 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore/GEO_MAP/1617643200?... [edit: and here's a comparison map showing that maligned is searched for over traduced at a ratio of 7:3 in the UK, 9:1 in the US. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=traduced,maligned#GEO_MAP https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=traduced,maligned... ]

pessimizer 6y ago
Also, "traduce" is euphemistic, so you can't be sure what it means even if you know the Latin. In romance languages it just means "translate."
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  But in English it does not mean translated. In that sense it is a false friend, it shares etymology with Romanian traduce but not meaning.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    Saying it is a false friend is just a repetition of what I just said. In English it is a euphemism, like "going out" means being involved in a romance. Traduce- means to translate, as a euphemism it becomes to distort. The only way to know what the word means in English is to know what the word means in English; there's no hinting other than context, and the contexts of the two possible meanings could be very similar. It's obviously not an incorrect usage, just an unnecessarily alienating one.