I used to teach my editing students at Loyola Maryland a nice little word, dilemma. It's ultimately from the Greek, di, "two," and lēmma, "assumption." In its strict sense, it means a choice between two equally disagreeable alternatives. Odysseus has to choose between Scylla and Charybdis; you have the devil and the deep blue sea, and neither is very nice.
You notice I said the strict sense. That sense has been rubbed smooth for a long time, and today the increasingly prevalent loose sense of dilemma is "difficult choice," "disagreeable choice," or even "problem." This kind of drift happens a lot in language. Terrific has moved from "inspiring awe and fear" to "awful" or "frightful" to "astounding" or "tremendous" to just "swell."
Now the strict sense of dilemma is still there in the language, and you are free to use it. You can even try to insist on it, inveighing against anyone who has the temerity to use it in the loose sense. If you inveigh thus, people will call you a fussbudget, and you will be fine about that, because fussbudgets are proud of being fussbudgets.
But if you are an ordinary person, or some byte-stained wretch editing for ordinary readers, you will have to develop your own sense of how strict or loose to be in any given situation, sensitive to both the language at large and to your specific context. Manuals like Garner's and Fowler's can inform you about distinctions as they exist, but they cannot advise you what to do in a specific instance. You have to develop judgment, case by case.
So if you are confronted by a text that uses dilemma, you may yourself face a dilemma, a minor but difficult choice.
