LAST week, as Americans around the country were making preparations for the annual celebration that commemorates our ability to sustain life on these shores, I received a tyrannical note from the mothership. I had previously written that "The next senator from Texas will likely be either David Dewhurst, currently the lieutenant governor, or Ted Cruz, a former state attorney." That's an ungrammatical use of "likely," my editor objected—"likely" is an adjective, and I had used it as an adverb—not to mention a "vile Americanism and BANNED" in The Economist.

Although I have no quarrel with vile Americanisms, I could see his point. The Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for "likely" as an adverb, with the caveat that this usage is now most common in North America. The Economist, however, declines to do so, and in a conflict between the OED and The Economist, I typically side with my incredibly erudite boss. As it happens, though, while writing the post, I had considered and rejected "possibly" or "probably." My reasoning was that "possibly" was too weedy. Anything's possible. One could say, with just as much accuracy, "The next senator from Texas will possibly be either Chuck Norris or a ham sandwich." And "probably" would have been a bit too strong. There is a third Republican candidate in the Senate race, former Dallas mayor Tom Leppert, who has a credible shot. So I arrived at "likely" as the midpoint between "possibly" and "probably", with Economist style going out the window along the way.

This isn't entirely trivial. Political analysts make a lot of predictions, but they often lard them with so many conditions that they are unfalsifiable, and hence useless. (And when they do make clear predictions, pundits have a a notoriously bad track record.) In my opinion, the least we can do is be conscientious about specifying our level of confidence in the prediction being offered. Having more expressions at our disposal facilitates that kind of candour.

I raised my editor's objection about "likely" to a Barcelona-based linguist friend. "He sounds like he would make an excellent Spaniard," she said. But more to the point, she continued, it seemed that the problem was a lack of alternatives: perhaps "liable," but that has been co-opted by the law. Actually, Texans frequently say that something is "liable" to happen. It's one of those oddly antiquated flourishes in American English. But the implication there is that the outcome under question is slightly undesirable. Southerners also say something is "fixing to" happen. That construction doesn't necessarily indicate agency; you might say that it's "fixing to rain," for example. But when used in reference to a person, the role of the actor is foregrounded. If I were to say that "Mr Dewhurst is fixing to win," it would imply that Mr Dewhurst is running a great campaign. Conversely, had I said "Odds are that Mr Cruz will be the next senator," it would suggest a certain fatalism. In this case, it might have been best to say, "It is likely that the next senator from Texas will be one of these two guys." That construction sacrifices some economy of expression, but if there's one thing we can be perfectly confident about, it's that you can't always have everything.