Eggcorn Forum

If you ignore obvious warnings and find yourself in an I-told-you-so predicament, is it a “predictament?”

A respectably large number of English speakers think that it is. “Predictament” is used in place of “predicament” on thousands of web pages. The pages include the usual scattering of puns, but most writers who use the word seem to believe–wrongly—that “predictament” is an authentic English word.

Three from the many examples of “predictament” on the web::

Chat forum: “ A slight predictament : Is there anyone that would mind talking me through a few issues that I am having with a couple clients that I have.”

Tech forum: “I am in the same predictament here…..the Toshiba SD-4990 vs the Philips 5960”

Comment on a news story: “I have contacted Mr. Gene Taylors office and got a call-back but this didn’t seem to help our predictament ”

“Predicament” is a noun built from the verb “predicate.” “Predictament,” we can assume, is constructed from the verb “predict.” While the verbs “predicate” and “predict” are sourced from the same Latin roots, they have been long separated in English–long enough that confusing them is considered an error by language mavens, who consistently flag the error (cf. the MWDEU discussion of the error). To predicate is to assign to a category, to state, to affirm, to presuppose, to base upon, while predicting means estimating, implying, foretelling. Using “predicate” when you mean “predict” will get your knuckles knocked by the narrow nobs of normative English.

If you are one of the sinners that use “predicate” for “predict,” you could call to your defense the venerable OED, which seems to undercut the normativists by citing “predict” as one meaning of “predicate.” The dictionary goes on to note, however, that the two words are in “recurrent independent confusion.” What they mean by this phrase, I think, is that the word “predicate” has been repeatedly and freshly eggcorned as “predict” over such a long period of time that the error deserves a dictionary entry. The OED provides examples of this confusion from the seventeenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The OED does not make a similar concession for the newer “predictament,” omitting it entirely from its word list. It does, however, document the evolution of “predicament” that has led to the word to a place where a conflation with “predict” is unavoidable. “Predicament” was at one time a philosophical word, the Latin translation of the Greek word for “category.” “Predicament” eventually came to denote to the things that were in a category, then the state of affairs that characterized the category and the things in it. The evolved word was so often modified by a negative adjective (“ill predicament,”strange predicament”) that the unmodified noun took on a negative nuance. By the eighteenth century a predicament was, in the opinion of most speakers of English, a thing you didn’t want to get into. Today the negative nuance of the word is so strong that “favorable predicament” smells like an oxymoron. Many predicaments are thoroughly predictable, entered through choices made with eyes wide open. In this semantic context, the step from “predicament” to “predictament” is a small shuffle. Will some future dictionary save us from the “recurrent independent confusion” of these two words by actually giving “predictament” full lexical status?