Okaaaaay, if you had told me this was a book in which the futuristic sexy necromancers check into hotels which have chocolates on fancy hotel pillows just like the twenty-first century US, I would have noped out so hard I fell over. I'm not as fussed as you over word choice, but you'd hope the worldbuilding would be... not this unseamless? IDK, I'm not sure how you got over it. Which is a shame bc many people have said how good it is. (Does "think of it as if a translator had translated it into twenty-first-century jargon" mean it could be twenty-first century AU or meta? Otherwise I would be having a hard time.)