Coley (not a fish but Veronica’s dog, which we were looking after) yelped, from surprise rather than pain, when my husband threw down the paper on the spot where the poor dog was taking his rest. ‘What’s he mean, “convince”?’
The culprit was a writer on the sports pages who had referred to Tom Hicks ‘trying to convince the banks to renegotiate the structure of the loans’. This encroachment by convince on to the territory of persuade has been going on for most of my life. It happens all the time now, but I do not feel moved to frighten the dog each time I detect it. My husband, I am sorry to say, has adopted the attitude of Betsey Trotwood to donkeys’ trespassing on the piece of green outside her house. Instead of crying, ‘Janet! Donkeys!’ he shouts, ‘What’s he mean, “convince”?’
The donkey sense of convince seems to have come from America. A periodical called Word Study noted in 1958 that the use of convince for ‘persuade’ was ‘becoming frequent in Pennsylvania and New York’.
One can see the overlap. When someone is trying to persuade you to go hunting because it will be fun, you might reply. ‘I’m not convinced.’ The lack of conviction is of the possibility of fun. In practice it is made to refer to the whole package of persuasion. Similarly, persuade and convince can be employed interchangeably in a perfectly proper way: ‘Lewis Hamilton tried to convince/persuade them of his innocence.’
Convince has drifted in its meaning before. The OED marks as obsolete a usage found in the Bible and in Milton, meaning ‘confuted’. There’s a nice text from the Acts of the Apostles, which in the translation of Rheims (1582) says that the eloquent Apollos ‘with vehemencie convinced the Iewes’.
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