It lacked staying power.
I thought Gaylord Perry ought to have titled his autobio “The Spitter and Me” (rather than “Me and the Spitter”). It has better flow, for one thing, and the politeness shown by placing his bread-and-butter pitch ahead of himself is becoming. The only advantage to “Me” first is that it makes the alphabetizing more obvious.
In Latin, maybe.
Resilience and resiliency have battled for supremacy since forever. The last time they were nearly equal in use was the 1920s. Since then, use of resilience has skyrocketed. Its rise can be mapped pretty closely to prescriptivist teaching, the increase in mass communication, and the internet.
In any event, you’ll see similarities in other -cy nouns like impotence/impotency and complacence/complacency, many of which began life as Latin verb forms then split into two noun forms when some people added the -cy noun ending to denote quality or likeness and some didn’t.
One oddball among the -cy nouns is normality/normalcy. You can thank Warren G. Harding for normalcy (he didn’t invent the word, but he popularized its use in that context).
There are a bunch of instances of words being adopted from Latin or Greek in a particular form, then there was sometimes a back-formation of a shorter form. Sometimes the shorter form didn’t stick, though.
In the History of English podcast, there’s an example given of expedite and it’s opposite, impedite, adopted in the same time period. Both led to shortened forms: expede and impede. Expede didn’t stick, so we have expedite, but impede.
Discussed around the 42 minute mark here:
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2021/04/28/episode-147-a-rude-and-rusty-language/
I love that podcast.
Ack. Seeing it quoted I immediately noticed the apostrophe in its. I admit it’s because I rarely type apostrophes–I just let autocorrect put them in as a shortcut. But it sometimes comes back to bite me when I forget to select the correct word for were, well, ill, and its.
Don’t sweat it:
Why does Tony Bologna rhyme but Sean Bean doesn’t? Shouldn’t his name be pronounced Seen Been or Shawn Bawn?
They might have in their earlier forms–John Bohn.
Seán uses Irish spelling, and bean doesn’t.
https://sillylinguistics.com/comprehensive-guide-to-irish-spelling/
The “e” in Seán is there to tell you how to pronounce the “S.”
I’m confused - weren’t you saying that resilience used to be a verb in English, which is how I read it?
Same reason as Bologna only rhymes with Tony in American English, not in Italian (or in other forms of English). Their pronunciation doesn’t have the same language root.
Ah, no, sorry. I wasn’t very clear there (in my defense, it was after 2 in the morning). I was trying to show why some nouns had -cy endings while words with similar sound and meaning didn’t. To clarify, they were often Latin verbs that became English nouns, hence the addition of the noun ending.
Ah, that does make sense now.