jQuery validate plugin - Incorrectly picking up partial class names needed for Omniture error/click tracking

jQuery validate plugin - Incorrectly picking up partial class names needed for Omniture error/click tracking

Ran across a likely unusual circumstance where the validate plugin went and picked out an unexpected partial part of a class name not meant for it and therefore applied more specific 'date' type validation as well as the intended 'required' class behaviour:

<select class="select required omniture omniBlank(CE:To date missing) omniError(CE:To date incorrect )" name="cardExpiryMonth" id="expiryMonth">
      <option value="">mm</option>
      <option value="01">01</option>
      ...
      <option value="12">12</option>
</select>

So Validate plugin was correctly picking up the 'required' class within that field, but unexpectedly was also picking up and trying to perform an additional 'date' validation on that field, which of course it failed given that the dropdown would only allow you to select 01 - 12 as the numerically month (with Year in a separate dropdown)

Seeing as those 'date' appearances are within ( ) parts of omniBlank and omniError class names I would suggest this is a bug with validate parsing this date string out of the middle of those classes?

Is there any way to switch off Validate plugin from looking for class attributes for it's instructions? (I would be happy to then specify all required fields within JavaScript block where I already specify more advanced rules)

Can anyone suggest any other ideas of workarounds?

At the moment we have changed all space characters within ( ) into underscores which has fixed this problem, but that requires us to then code additional back-end translation and processing to ensure the Omniture stuff still works as it should.