Tsk Tsk. As I used to tell my students, since there are more "things" in the world than there are words in any language we have no choice but to use the same word to mean many different things. I've never checked out the history of the word "contradiction," but I'll risk a guess on that history: It BEGAN by naming situations such as two rams butting each other or two armies clashing, and only later was metaphorically applied in the sense W identifies. There are probably other important uses of the word incompatible with _either_ Rakesh's or W's usage. Live with it. That's the way language operates.
Carrol
^^^^
CB: I wonder. The Latin root is something like "dicter". "dictum" , "to speak". This would seem to mean it started as reference to conflict between spoken words, like a debate or a dialectic.
"Dicta" of a legal opinion is "just words" not the substantive 'holding"