What’s So Problematic About ‘Problematic’?

Do you sense something problematic about the word “problematic”? The way it’s used has changed a great deal in recent years, so much that it can now seem a little shifty. The journey that brought us here, however, is less problematic than typical. The life story of “problematic” is an education on how words change over time.

Its root word, “problem,” would have mystified King Alfred. The closest Old English equivalent was a homely word that looked kind of like a cough: “þearf.” Geoffrey Chaucer knew “problem,” however: Middle English took it in from the French “​​problème,” losing the final e and the accent. But that wasn’t its true origin. The word traced all the way to the ancient Greek word “proballein,” meaning “to throw forward,” as in something put forth for analyzing. This first meaning of “problem” is the one we now use in “math problem” or “problem set.”

The meaning of “problem” we now think of most immediately, as something that troubles us or a sticky situation, evolved from that. A proposition put forward often calls for fashioning a solution to something noisome: We therefore have a problem in the “Houston, we have a problem” sense we’re all familiar with.

That kind of evolution is typical. (That kind of narrowing from general to specific is normal, too. “Audition” started as a fancy word for hearing, with the same root as “auditory.” Because assessing a performer’s suitability for a role often involves listening to the person speak or sing, “audition” narrowed to mean a tryout.)

“Problematics” was an even later arrival, but it harked back to the original sense of the root. When my fellow academics refer — as they started doing a great deal toward the end of the last century — to the problematics of a topic, they are listing not annoying things that need to be fixed but intriguing twists that deserve extended consideration. In the book “Problematics of Sociology,” for example, the sociologist Neil Smelser addressed issues of noted complexity in his field.

Even the fact that the word is “problematic” rather than “problematical” illustrates something about how words change: the role of serendipity, despite the appeal of regularity. The two words were both rare until about the 1970s. Today “problematic” is many times more common than its almost twin. In the same way, “exotic” long ago extinguished “exotical.” In other instances, the variant ending in “al” takes the prize: Today we recognize the word “heretic” as a noun. But it used to function as an adjective too, until “heretical” won out. You just never know. Sometimes one version takes on a different meaning altogether. “Fantastic” once meant “remote from reality,” but today we use “fantastical” for that meaning, while “fantastic” is the name of a bathroom cleanser and an exclamation meaning “great.” Meanwhile “fanatic” and “fanatical” just sit there side by side, persisting as alternatives of equivalent stature.