Traduce (pronounced truh-doos or truh-dyoos)
(1) To malign a person or entity by making malicious and/or
false or defamatory statements; slander; libel; defame.
(2) To pass on (to one's children, future generations
etc.); to transmit (archaic).
(3) To pass into another form of expression; to rephrase,
to translate (archaic).
1525–1535: From the Latin trādūcō (lead as a spectacle, dishonor), from trādūcere (to lead over, transmit, disgrace), a variant of trānsdūcere (to transfer, display, expose), the construct being tra- (from the preposition trāns (through, across, beyond)) + dūcere (to lead). Synonyms include vilify, decry & disparage. The Latin trādūcere was from the Proto-Italic tranzdoukō and cognates included the Italian tradurre and the French traduire. The noun transduction (act of leading or carrying over) is from the 1650s, from the Latin transductionem & traducionem (nominative transductio) (a removal, transfer), noun of action from the past-participle stem of transducere & traducere (change over, convert) which also picked up the meaning "lead in parade, make a show of, dishonor, disgrace". Traduce, traduction, traduced & traducing are verbs, traducement & traducer are nouns, traducingly is an adverb and traducible is an adjective; the most common noun plural is traducements.
To be traduced in speech or in writing (historically treated in English (and related) legal systems respectively as libel and slander but some systems have reformed their rules and now treat all as just the single concept of defamation) can allow the victim to seek redress through legal process, the available remedies including retractions, apologies and damages by way of financial compensation. Also available is the injunction to prevent publication and what has become popular in some jurisdictions in the (secret) secret injunction, a device whereby (1) publication is denied, (2) all details of the matter (names of the parties or even an allusion to the nature of the proscribed material) and (3) the very fact any injunction has been granted is kept secret.
Mostly a thing of civil law, in some jurisdictions there’s still the offence of criminal defamation but its very existence is now less common and use seldom. Criminal defamation exists when someone publishes defamatory material knowing it is, or not caring if it is, false with the intention to, or not having regard to whether it will, cause serious harm to the victim or any other person is guilty of a crime. In most cases, the same defenses available in a civil action can be used in a criminal matter; a criminal charge does not preclude civil action being taken for the same publication. The matter of truth is interesting. In the United States, truth is an absolute defense to an action for defamation. As many have found out, that doesn’t mean there aren’t in the US consequences for publishing something defamatory but the action taken will not be on grounds of libel or slander. Although it seems strange to many, truth isn’t an absolute defense in many jurisdictions but it can be a matter raised in mitigation so that even if a judgment is delivered against a defendant, the damages awarded may be nominal.
Publish and be damned
Although there’s always been a suspicion a ghost writer
may have helped a bit in matters of style, the content of Harriette Wilson’s (1786–1845)
book The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson:
Written by Herself was all her own. First
published in 1825, it was a best seller and thought topical enough to deserve a
re-print a century later, it’s notable still for having one of the finest opening
lines of any auto-biography ever published:
"I shall not say how and why I became, at the age of
fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven."
The cover of some of the French editions were more alluring than those sold in England.
However much the tales of Regency’s most
revealing courtesan may have delighted readers, there was one not so
happy. In the mail one morning in
December 1824, Arthur Wellesley (1st Duke of Wellington; 1769–1852, UK
prime-minister 1828-1830) the famous soldier who led the coalition of armies which
defeated Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821; leader of the French Republic 1799-1804 & Emperor of the French from 1804-1814 & 1815) at Waterloo in 1815, found a letter from the publisher John
Joseph Stockdale (circa 1775-1847) which can’t have been pleasant reading. Stockdale was attempting blackmail, advising
the duke he was about to publish Miss Wilson’s revelations which contained “various
anecdotes” of Wellington which “it would be most desirable to withhold” and
that could be arranged were payment to be made.
Duke of Wellington (1816) by Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830).
The duke's response was the famous “Publish and be damned!” reputedly
scrawled across Stockdale’s letter and sent to him by return mail. Publish Stockdale did, the book, a romp through
the beds of the aristocracy appearing by installments before appearing in bookshops
where it scandalized and thrilled London society although it would have been
more salacious still had more of Stockdale’s blackmail victims had the
fortitude of the iron duke and refused to pay. An instant best-seller, the book went through
thirty-one printings in a year and pirated copies were on-sale all over the
continent but even without revenue from overseas sales the book was lucrative
although the Stockdale was soon ruined by libel suits from those whose reputations
had been traduced and Miss Wilson would eventually die in obscurity.
Riveting reading it may have been but so many of the libel
actions against Stockdale were able to succeed in English courts because of the
many errors of detail and chronology but historians nevertheless agree the narrative
is substantially a reliable track of Miss Wilson’s adventures even if the
sequence of events is sometimes misleading; to be fair, she had so many affairs
it would be churlish not to allow for a little vagueness of recollection, one man presumably much the same as another after a while. Whether “Publish and be damned!” in the duke’s
own hand was ever written across the letter and sent back has never been
confirmed because the original apparently hasn’t survived but there’s enough
evidence from contemporaries to leave no doubt he certainly spoke the words but
whatever she wrote of her time with Wellington, it must have been sufficiently
truthful to convince the duke not to issue a writ for libel, despite at the
time having threatened to sue “...if such rubbish is published”.
His marriage was already unhappy and the disclosures
probably little surprised the duchess and the union endured until her
death while the book clearly did no lasting harm
to the duke's public reputation, the hero of Waterloo afforded some latitude in
pre-Victorian England. Within a decade
of publication he would be prime minister and when he died in 1852, he was
again a national hero and granted a state funeral, a rare distinction in
England, unlike Australia where they’re given to reasonably successful football coaches and television
personalities. The phrase “Publish and be damned!” entered the language and was in 1953 used as the title of a book
detailing the history of the Daily Mirror newspaper, a tabloid which once had its own interesting history.
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