Or consider a collective bargaining agreement between the Stanwood-Camano School District of the state of the Washington and its staff, represented by a local chapter of the Service Employees International Union. It's signed by the employees rather than the district, so I suppose we have the teachers themselves to blame. Like the state of New Jersey the educators of Stanwood-Camano offer an explicit, and wrong, definition of “emergent situation” as well as considering what to do when a “change is emergent in nature” by which they mean an urgent change rather than a novel one.

A forgivable reason for this mistake is the idea that “emergent” is the adjective form of “emergency”; as Professor Paul Brians of Washington State University explains, this is unecessary as “emergency” is an adjective as well as a noun. It's also possible that users want to sound smarter than they are (two words for the price of one!) or want to euphemistically soften the scary-sounding “emergency” with the softer “emergent situation”. These are bad reasons; if you find yourself reaching for this phrase, examine your heart. And stop doing it!