resilient

Resilient means able to take hard blows and recover. A resilient child, a resilient economy, a resilient material that springs back into shape.

The physical sense came first — a resilient substance returns to its form after being bent — and the human sense is the same picture. It is a strong compliment and it has become one of the most used words in education, psychology and business writing, to the point where resilience is now sometimes criticised as a way of asking people to endure things that should be fixed instead. Worth knowing, because the word carries that argument with it. In engineering, resilience is a measurable property of a material.