superfluity

Thankfully, YA novelist Robin Wasserman’s 2016 adult debut, “Girls on Fire,” boasts a superfluity of violently intense female friendship to tide us over until Season 3.

In 1899, Thorstein Veblen’s landmark socio-economic study, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” showed how free time and superfluity — what we now call luxury — conferred status, or “reputability,” on the wealthiest individuals in late 19th-century America.

But, a little paradoxically, the collection is most valuable when it’s proving its own superfluity: The best material is what made it onto the completed record.

The novel renders the dailiness of life for a cloistered superfluity — no one woman matters more than any other, and plot is done away with; there’s no tidy narrative arc or chain of cause and effect.

A group of crows is a murder; pandas, an embarrassment; nuns, a superfluity — a term that dates to the Middle Ages, when nunneries were overcrowded, lice-ridden and destitute.