A Short Complaint About Normalcy

“Normalcy” has become an accepted word again. I used to do spit takes whenever I heard it, which did no good and led to serious dehydration issues.

Everybody uses it anyway and seems to have abandoned the word “normality” altogether.

Most of us, even amateur nitpickers like me, think nitpickers are scolds unwilling to concede that English almost always changes for the better. The changes may come from science, law and business. Financial engineers concoct new terms all the time. The terms add to their tribal vocabulary and, as a bonus, help trick us into investing in things we don’t really understand.

For my money the best changes don’t flow top to bottom. They percolate up, often from immigrant and disadvantaged communities and, not infrequently, mistakes.

Which puts “normalcy” in a special category. It was introduced to the broader society from the top-down and by a mistake.

From at least 1857 until 1920, “normalcy” was just a higher mathematics term that described values at right angles to each other.

                Then, in 1920 and near the top, presidential candidate Warren G. Harding mistakenly thought the best course after the first horrifying world war and the 1918 flu pandemic was to get back to “normalcy.”

Wherever normalcy was, Harding’s campaign promised to take us there.

The elusive “normal”

Asked why his posters put the word in quote marks, Harding explained he chose “normalcy” because he couldn’t find “normality” in the dictionary.

Harding, who had not one but two mistresses, might have had a different idea about what was “normal” anyway. Publicly, however, most interpreted “normalcy” at the time as something like peace and prosperity.

These days “normalcy” as well as “normal” and “normality” aren’t national, community aspirations like in Harding’s day. Normalcy is now a personal longing for our individual lives like they were before COVID-19. The change fits the polarized, atomized, almost anti-community society we’ve become.

It’s a society that does resemble values at right angles to each other. All opposing opinions are absolutely right. Sacrificing one of them to achieve some sort of shared happiness is now a sucker’s game.