在amazon看到一本书，《先生,伦勃朗又不见了:恶名昭彰的艺术品偷窃故事》，题目不好听，还有点儿问题，一个事件怎么“恶名昭彰”呢？历史上那么多著名的案件，也没听说哪个是“恶名”的。原书是Stealing Rembrandts The Untold Stories Of Notorious Art Heists （by AnthonyM. Amore and Tom Mashberg），而notorious在很多英汉词典将“臭名昭著”列为第一义，似乎不那么地道（“恶名”当然更具体了）。那“成语”《辞源》都不收，来历不明不白，隐约还带着65度的阶级仇恨。

我们来看notorious在英文字典里是怎么定义的（见OED，其他字典省了）：

     1.1 Of facts: Well known;commonly or generally known; forming a matter of common knowledge.

2.2  Of places, persons, etc.: Well or widelyknown (now rare); †famous.

b.2.b Such as is or may be generally, openly,or publicly known. Now rare.

3.3  Conspicuous; obvious, evident. Obs.

4.4 Usedattributively with designations of persons which imply evil or wickedness: Well   known, noted (as being of this kind).

5.5 Noted for some bad practice, quality, etc.; unfavourably known; well known onaccount   of something which is notgenerally approved of or admired. a.5.a Of persons.

b.5. b Of actions, qualities, facts, etc.

6.6 Discreditable, disgraceful to one.

其实，notorious本来就是简单的“闻名”（它与notice和noble有相同的词源），后来（17世纪后）才多用于负面的东西，但也多是事实陈述，没有什么仇恨和褒贬，中译“臭名昭著”、“臭名远扬”、“声名狼藉”等等，都过分了，那种意义在实际应用中不多——随便拿几本书（非虚构类）拈几个句子来看，没一个“臭名”或“恶名”的： 

l        Since the studyof critical phenomena is a study of limits that cannot be reached in physical systems, the field is notorious for debates regarding the significance of experimental work.

l        Most notorious were the 'radium poisonings' at a luminous dial painting plant in East Orange, whereworkers would lick small paint brushes on which radium was deposited, in order to get a fine brush point.

l        He was much indemand for lecturing to the engineers who were notoriously difficult to control.

l        Probably the most notorious document defending certain acts of that war was a German manifesto.

l        The most notorious judgment advanced by the grammarians was the objection to the STRANDED PREPOSITION – the notionthat you mustn’t end a sentence with a preposition.

l        The most notorious square root is the square root of 2.

l        Girolamo tried to enter the College of Physiciansin Milan andwas rejected-nominally for illegitimacy but in fact, largely because of his notorious lack of tact.

l        She can hardly avoid following the notorious device of Divide et Impera.

l        Fluid flows are modeled by Navier–Stokes equations, notoriously difficult beasts to tame mathematically.

l        Among other personal friends of the editor is the notorious John Stevenson Hall, better known as Hall Stevenson.

l        He also formulates a first version of what later became the notorious Axiom 5 in his GGA, opening up the possibility forthe derivation of Russell’s paradox.

l        In the former we would have to accept the force of some pattern of inductive reasoning, in which the result in some cases, those that have been studied, are generalized to all cases, a notoriously shaky inference.

     这些例子继续提醒我们，翻译不能抄英汉词典，更不能滥用中国特色的成语。