Fisheries

The twenty-second entry is la pêche illicite, and the adjective is one an English reader recognises at once and should not reuse. Illicite is the flat, unexcited term of the rule book: whatever a rule does not allow. It covers an agreement — une cause illicite makes a contract void — a substance, a broadcast, un contenu illicite on a website, and the fishing named here. Nothing in it suggests secrecy or shame; it records that a text has been breached, and no more. « Illicit » set out from the same place and then narrowed. It now carries a whiff of the clandestine and the faintly disreputable: an illicit affair, illicit substances, an illicit still in a shed. Write « illicit fishing » and the phrase stops naming a legal category and starts hinting at something furtive, which is precisely what an inspector’s report must not do. The settled renderings are « illegal fishing », the wording the international scheme itself uses beside « unreported » and « unregulated », and, in drafting, « unlawful ». Same word, different manners, and only one of the two belongs in a regulation.