Marketing and advertising

Ninth on the list is séduire, and it is the one word here that an English reader must not translate by its cognate. Cette annonce séduit surtout les jeunes says that the advertisement appeals mainly to young people, wins them over, goes down well with them — and nothing more. The French verb has spread across working life and cooled on the way: le projet a séduit le jury, un pays qui cherche à séduire les investisseurs, une idée séduisante, which is simply an attractive idea. « Seductive » can do none of that. An « appealing » idea and a « seductive » idea are not the same suggestion, and a jury that has been seduced is a scandal rather than a decision. Both verbs come from Latin seducere, to lead aside, and the fork is how far each language let the leading go. English narrowed it to one kind of persuasion and thereby made it unusable in a report. French kept the whole range, so the strong sense is still there, supplied by the sentence when it is needed. In marketing prose the safe renderings are « appeal to », « win over » and « attract ».