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.”