Nails, Meet Chalkboard

The only thing better than an all-day training workshop is an all-day training workshop hosted by someone who likes to use words that aren't. I feel quite comfortable asserting that motivational speakers and their ilk are culpable for some of the most irreverent massacring of the English language since the colonists decided to start calling their knickers underwear. We can thank these would-be wordsmiths for contributions including deliverable as a noun and synergy as, well, a word.

Perhaps you or someone you love is a fan of this sort of guerilla linguistics. If so, I pose a question to you: What in the world is the difference between competence and competency? As near as I can tell they're synonymous, rendering competency unnecessarily redundant, but what the hell do I know? So like any committed researcher, I decided to ask Google.

According to WordNet, competence is defined as "the quality of being adequately or well qualified physically and intellectually." Conversely, competency is defined as, well, "the quality of being adequately or well qualified physically and intellectually."

Huh. Well, whatever - that's not a real dictionary anyway. Surely a more reliable source will clear things right up.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, competence is "the state or quality of being adequately or well qualified; ability." Per Merriam-Webster, it's "the quality or state of being functionally adequate." As for competency? Why, how odd! Each dictionary refers back to its entry for competence.

I guess competence just doesn't sound as... refined? Sophisticated? Word-like? Perhaps I judge too harshly. Maybe if I were getting paid the money that these people make for the swill they shovel, I'd feel compelled to engage in these sorts of parlance parlor tricks too.

Or, you know, not.

I move that people who use "words" like competency spend less time figuring out how to add y onto the ends of perfectly good words and more time figuring out why I have to spend two eight-hour days listening to two hours worth of actual information.