Peeve.

Perhaps the most peevish pets are the idiosynchratic ones. In the linguistic sense, this refers to situations where some, no-doubt boorish and knuckle-dragging, dictionary editor (it really is suprising that such people would ever get into such a business, but you open up an "American Heritage" and there you have it) decides that two forms of the same word or grammar construct are valid and you feel, um, otherwise.

Take: "Problematical"

Cringe. The word is "problematic." It means, "giving rise or relating to a problem." It has a suffix already - "ic." You want to add "al," and we now have two suffixes, a meta-adjective meaning "giving rise or relating to something problematic, which gives rise or relates to a problem."

Of course, that's an opinion. Why? Because an academic review of "ic" and "ical" adjectives in the English language shows that sometimes the two forms have different meaning, such as "historic" and "historical," and sometimes they don't, as with "symmetric" and "symmetrical." [PDF] The latter is of particular interest because I don't hesitate to use "symmetrical" to indicate that something is symmetric, um, al. That just sounds right.

Still, Problematical? Feh.