Garner’s Modern English, my favorite language reference book this side of the Devil’s Dictionary or H.L. Mencken’s book of Quotations, is one of the sources that can quickly convince me I have been wrong about some matter. This week, I was looking into the word “resiliency,” a virtue not much practiced in the 2020s, having lost out to a series of buzzphrases about living your truth, it being OK not to be OK, hurt people hurting people, leaning in, and the like.
It turns out, according to Garner’s, that “resiliency” is a “needless variant.” The word is resilience. Needless variants are when there are “two or more forms of the same word without nuance or differentiation.” Drawing on the late style and usage writer Henry Fowler, Bryan A. Garner decries this type of word that makes it seem like you mean something different when really you are just avoiding an echo while introducing confusion, such as when someone avoids using “quantify” a second time in a row by going for “quantitate” the second time. I defer to Garner, who corrects my misconception that “resiliency” is the more abstract term for the human virtue and “resilience” is the more mundane descriptor for how much abuse something can take without breaking. And while we’re correcting misconceptions about resilience, how about this August NPR piece headlined “Why you should stop complimenting people for being ‘resilient’”? Apparently, though intuitively we think of it as one — “being called ‘strong,’ ‘tenacious’ or ‘resilient’ is usually perceived as a compliment” — resilience is no virtue at all. In fact, “glorifying resilience can actually be detrimental.”
What effrontery is this? Why is NPR publishing drivel this outright insane? Glad you asked. This piece is in a psychological wellness section of NPR called Life Kit, which basically deals in tendentious and baseless claims appealing to strange racial stereotypes and psychology “experts” who seem never to cite any actual clinical psychology research. Encouraging people to cultivate the habit of going to pieces when faced with adversity is, for whatever reason, the thing that the staff of this section have decided constitutes wisdom and anti-racism. Apparently, resilience is a trait that black women have had to exhibit more of over time (cf. the “strong black woman” trope), and so we need to be careful, lest “unexamined resilience … mask structural forces that make your life harder.”
NPR’s article would be more helpful if it had been published in Wingdings. A comic in the NPR piece reads that “as a Black person, [the main character] knows that this idea of being ‘strong and resilient’ has a dark past. It’s a leftover from slavery. It’s a leftover from colonization. It’s a leftover from indentured servitude. When you talk about people as if they’re animals, as if they’re subhuman, then you are only commenting on their physical capacity, which has morphed into resilience.”
Hopefully it is not necessary to say this is a paranoiac and also factually false etymology of how and why we have the word resilience and why we associate positive things with it. Arguing against cultivating human virtues and psychological strength is just a harmful thing to do, and I wish NPR would spend my tax dollars on something more productive or even just light them on fire instead of doing this. But you can only control what you can control.
As for the strong black woman trope, and whether it is so problematic that it should cause us to reject strength itself as an aspiration, I defer once again, this time to Gil Scott Heron, the great singer and black radical who wrote “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” In his heartbreaking final album, I’m New Here, he wrote these lyrics in homage to his mother:
“All the love I needed was provided
And through my mothers sacrifices I saw where her life went
To give more than birth to me, but life to me
And this ain’t one of the cliches about black women being strong
Cause hell if you’re weak, you’re gone.”
Either NPR is wrong about resilience or Gil Scott Heron is. Pick your side.
