Monday, March 06, 2017

A dilemma or dilemna over dilemna or dilemma?

There is a website about this-- what is the proper spelling of dilemma?  I started on another post with the title "A Dilemna"  but the spell checker insisted it was "Dilemma."  I'll find a new word...dilemma somehow looks diminished, the two m's robbing it of the power that the "mn" gave it I think.  (Parenthetically, I must never use the word...otherwise some spell checker here or in Word or whereever would have found it somewhere and the same issue would have come up then and I would have remembered it...and where is "spell checker" from anyway...sigh...so many questions...)

1 comment:

  1. There is not only "dilemma", there is "lemma". The words derive from a Greek word that Liddell and Scott give as meaning "anything received, income, receipts : gain, profit." In logic it means, more or less, a proposition used as an intermediate step toward proving another. You get a dilemma when you gave two lemmas that lead to conflicting results.

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