What is the origin of ‘dilemma’?
What’s a word for ‘the lesser of two evils’? As many American voters like to joke, it’s the choice for the next President of the United States. But for word nerds like me, it’s a dilemma – which, speaking of evil, can still bedevil us with its horns.
A history of dilemma
Today, a dilemma is generally a ‘difficult situation or problem’. Historically, however, a dilemma names a much more specific challenge. Dated to the early 1500s, English borrowed dilemma from Late Latin, which, in turn, borrowed the word from the Greek δίλημμα (dilemma). Meaning a ‘double proposition’, Greek’s dilemma joins δι- (di-, ’twice’) and λῆμμα (lemma, ‘premise’ or ‘assumption’). Literally ‘that which is taken up’, the Greek lemma also referred to ‘income’ or ‘profit’.
Dilemma’s ‘double proposition’ has technical meanings in rhetoric and logic. In rhetoric, a dilemma is an argument that forces a person to choose between two undesirable alternatives. In formal logic, a dilemma features two conditions that imply the same conclusion, often, though not necessarily, unfavourable in nature. Ethical philosophers bend our minds with no-win moral dilemmas, such as the Trolley Problem. An action film, meanwhile, can put us on the edges of our seats, say, when a superhero must decide whether or not to kill a villain.
I had a teacher who used to perplex his students with the following question: “Answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’: Have you stopped cheating on your tests?” If we students answered ‘yes’, we admitted to cheating. If we answered ‘no’, we implied we were continuing to cheat. No matter our answer, we were caught between the two ‘horns’ of the dilemma, as the metaphor goes, each of which impaled us. Like matadors, cleverer students rejected the diabolical premise. I, for one, looked to Pamplona and simply ran from the question.
One, two, or three lemmas?
Two lemmas (or lemmata, if we want to use the Greek plural) certainly make for an unsavory situation. But what about one? That’s not so bad if you’re a mathematician, where a lemma is a proposition that can help prove a theorem. Nor if you’re lexicographer, where a lemma is a headword: that is, the word that is at the top of a dictionary entry. Lemma is also featured in astronomy: an analemma is the figure-of-eight representation on a globe that plots out the position of the sun over the course of the year.
Now, citing its etymology, some insist a dilemma can only properly refer to two unfavourable alternatives, which explains trilemma. As you may have guessed from its prefix, this more obscure term dated to the late 1600s involves a choice among three unwelcome outcomes – a word those same American voters might want to use if a candidate mounts a third-party challenge, as some political figures are floating in the campaign.