Convince/persuade

[abstibus]

I am becoming increasingly irritated by the use of the verb 'convince', instead of 'persuade'. Also annoyed by misuse of 'hopefully' , 'whenever', 'decimate' and loads more. Anyone feel the same?

[heathfield]

Yep, discussed here yesterday.

[jno]

words change. Decimate meant one thing to the Romans, it means another thing to us. The war against hopefully (which has a parallel in German, hoffentlich) was lost 30 years ago. They aren't being misused; the usage has changed. But if you stick to the old usages, you'll still be understood.

[THECORBYLOON]

In Chambers online dictionary it states,

"convince verb (convinced, convincing) to persuade someone of something; to make or cause to make them believe it. convinced adj firm in one's belief..." (That's ma emphasis by the way)

[abstibus]

Check preposition used after verb.

[Keeprockin]

The one word that is creeping into our English,and I really hate,is the 'redneck' word Snuck,replacing the verb sneaked. Even a BBC broadcaster used it a few mornings since

[Bert]

I too was annoyed by the 'misuse' of hopefully, but then I realised that we have been using "abbreviations" like this for ages. Take "fortunately", for instance. We use it to mean "It is fortunate that..." So the same with hopefully, meaning "It is to be hoped that..." What I also realised is that it is not so much the misuse as the over-use that was annoying me. There was a time when it seemed that everybody interviewed on TV began by saying, "Hopefully..." I'm not sure whether that was bfore or after everybody was beginning their sentences with "Basically,...". Have you noticed that the Australian HRT is nowhere near as common as it was a couple of years ago? Fashions of speech change. My pet hate is "dissect" pronounced to rhyme with "bisect". I moaned to the BBC, but their pronunciation unit said that nothing can be done about it. They gave as an example "Balcony", which used to be pronounced to rhyme with "baloney", but as soon as 51% of people pronounce a word incorrectly, then the wrong pronunciation is the correct pronunciation!

[Bert]

I meant to ask, annemollie, could you give an example of what you mean with the convince/persuade confusion? The language you hear on radio and TV these days doesn't bear thinking about. People say "rung" when they mean "rang", "there is" followed by a plural, and nobody born outside Warrington (where I was born) seems to be able to say "lie", as in "Lie down, you'll soon feel better."

[jno]

In theory a person can be convinced of something without being persuaded by someone; but I think the two words are pretty much the same in daily English.