Wordwatch: Persuade
The coronavirus pandemic has been a time of varying authorities offering advice in unaccustomed conditions. The latest to arrive on my screen is a “Little Booklet of Phone Scams”. I would have thought a “booklet” was a little book, so the adjective is surely redundant? But I will let that pass. The first sentence of the booklet is:
“Criminals can impersonate your bank, the police, tax office, investment or software companies and other trusted organisations. They will try to convince you to part with your money.”
In my day, that’s to say, until recently, the verb “to convince” didn’t take an infinitive; the construction was “I convinced him that his money would be safer with me,” or “I convinced him that the weather would be wet.” The alternative way of putting it, if we wanted to use an infinitive, would be: “I persuaded him to part with his money,” or “to take an umbrella.”
But “persuade” is a verb that is disappearing from the language. The new use seems to be an Americanism, but it may have grown up on both sides of the Atlantic. “Aparna was delighted to see her father … but was unable to convince him to do a jigsaw puzzle with her” (Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy, 1993, chap. 7.5). Although generally well written, Seth’s novel abounds in unfortunate minor solecisms (presumably acquired during his time in California), of which this is perhaps the least forgivable specimen: when spoken by characters who are supposed to inhabit the India of 1951, they create unintended anachronisms.
“If someone is a very good friend, I scratch his head and I try to convince him to scratch mine back.” – Alberto Porta (‘Evru’) in The Art Newspaper, Jan 2005.
Not someone, it seems, from whom one would expect standard English; but this clearly illustrates the difference between “persuade” and “convince”. To convince someone of something involves some process of argument; to persuade someone to do something may require pressure but it need not involve thought. Think of the Aesop fable of the Sun and the Wind competing to separate a traveller from his cloak: “Persuasion is better than force.” Evru clearly needed “persuade” for what he wished to say.
The new use of “convince” gained the imprimatur of the BBC early in the new century: “[The physicist Edward Teller] convinced President Reagan to spend millions of dollars on Star Wars” (BBC Radio 4 News, 10 September 2003). “Persuaded” would have been far better here.
As so often, the new usage makes for a comprehensible sentence and so passes muster. But it threatens to deprive the language of another valuable distinction.