Sometimes I love the internet, sometimes it makes me weep for humanity. This is a case of love at first site.
Don’t read it yet, but the link to the original article can be found at the end of this post.
First off, let’s figure out if you are from another dimension. It all comes down to how you spell a certain word. I don’t want to type the word yet, so I will describe the word in question so that you can decide how you spell it.
It is a word that begins with the letters ‘Dil’, has three syllables and it can be defined as “a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives, especially equally undesirable ones.”
Faced with such a choice you might say “I have a real dil- on my hands”. A quandary, a difficult choice, three syllables…
Ok, so do you know the word to which I am referring? Now I want you to think about how you would spell the word. Go ahead and write it down (or type it, whatever works).
Now I just need some filler so that you won’t see the word before it is time.
If you’re not familiar with the image, that’s an image of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Left over energies from the big bang. I love science!
Anyway, back to discovering if this might not be the universe that you are originally from.
The word is:
DILEMNA
D-I-L-E-M-N-A
That is how I have always spelled the word. That is how I learned to spell the word. I remember (like the person in the original article) specifically learning it as dil-em-na. That is how I would think about it in order to spell it.
I am not alone. Based on nothing scientific except for looking at google search results, it appears as though around 10% of the English speaking population who use Google, spell it this way, and were taught to spell it like this.
The strange thing is it never appears in the past. It is not referenced as a spelling in any old or new dictionaries. It came from the Greek words Di – meaning two, and Lemma – meaning options. SO it has always been Dilemma.
Yet how is it that literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have learned that the correct way is with an N and not a double M. How is it that throughout our schooling no one ever pointed out that we are spelling it wrong, looked in the dictionary or in other literature?
Perhaps it is because there are a group of people (the N people?) who somehow have passed between dimensions, coming from an alternate dimension in which dilemna is, and has always been, spelled with an N. So when we were younger and did look the word up in a dictionary, or see it in print it was always spelled dilemna.
Perhaps we are the children of the N Dimension, and our only proof is the spelling of dilemna.
If I had a little more L. Ron. Hubbard-ness I could probably start a religion based on the mysterious ‘N Dimension’ (Generation N, because silent N’s are holy).
Now that you have read it as dilemna six times, does it look any more or less correct to you?
How about seeing dilemma for the second time?
Have your thoughts on the spelling of the word changed or wavered at all? Are you perhaps a part of Generation N and you’re only now realizing it?
It was a great article and I have not done it justice, please read the original and enjoy. Not much of a dilemna in that choice.
Hope it makes you smile!
–TAPP
The Amateur Philosophysicist 