I too enjoy the economist. Their level-headed style and combination of numeracy and humanism are welcome in an often dogmatic and sensationalist media climate.
The tools that you describe are how all news should be written! The inverted pyramid of information -- broad but important bits at the top, details at the bottom -- is a structure I remember from my high school newspaper class.
I do want to point out that there's a fine line between using precise words and being intelligible to the public. "Traduced," as you introduce in example, isn't a common word where I'm from, and could be expressed in other ways (slandered, defamed, maligned) that are in more common circulation. A case of 'know thine audience' I suppose.
> where I'm from
Where is that? And is maligned that much more common than traduced? Is either one intelligible to the average person in the street (wherever they are from)?
Anyway, I quite like to read a word that I have never used, it enriches my vocabulary.
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.
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.
The tools that you describe are how all news should be written! The inverted pyramid of information -- broad but important bits at the top, details at the bottom -- is a structure I remember from my high school newspaper class.
I do want to point out that there's a fine line between using precise words and being intelligible to the public. "Traduced," as you introduce in example, isn't a common word where I'm from, and could be expressed in other ways (slandered, defamed, maligned) that are in more common circulation. A case of 'know thine audience' I suppose.