While listening to the BBC Worldservice, I am listening to an interesting report on possible post-Saddam Iraqi leadership possibilities.
I am listening intently, when out of nowhere, the aural pollution known as “normalcy” goes into my ears.
AUGH! That word was a screw-up by a none-too-bright US president (Harding)! It wasn’t a word back then, and it isn’t a word now! The word, my dear friends, is “normality.”
I hate to sound like the French, but our beautiful English language is being polluted by idiocy. I implore all of my English-speaking brethren to immediately cease using that accursed word.
Then, just maybe, we can return to a state of…normality. :mad:
Dictionary.com lists “normalcy” as a real word. It gives the definition as “normality” which leads me to believe that the two are both interchangeable and correct.
Dictionary.com only lists it because it’s commonly used. Numerous obscenities are at the site, as well. It doesn’t make them words that one wants to use, if one wants to sound intelligent.
Phrases get coined. Common usage can make these phrases valid tools for communication (frequently followed by a dictionary appearence). Sometimes a person can make up a word that never existed but fits. The word then spreads and becomes common. Language is fluid, not static. Rules are suggestive and came about as a way to describe language not the other way around. If someone uses a word, and the listener gets what the speaker meant, then communication has occured. The communication is what is important, not the inert and lifeless words (read: tools).
Using slang or the venacular does not make one sound unintelligent neccesarily. In fact, in some cases, it can make the speaker seem more endearing and less condescending. Many people do not enjoy listening to people who appear to try to talk over them. That’s not to say that people who ignore grammar are always intelligent, just that how often someone breaks grammar rules is a poor gauge of their intelect. A better measure would be how well the speaker can relate meaning.
" Hence normalcy chiefly U.S. = NORMALITY; normalist.
1857 DAVIES & PECK Math. Dict. 386 If we denote the co-ordinates of the point of contact, and normalcy, by x´´ and y´´. 1878 BELLINGHAM tr. Haulleville’s Aspects Cath. & Protestantism 184 The fellow-countrymen of Ovid, of Horace and of Virgil, were not all normalists. 1893 Nation 30 July 47/1 Believers…in the mathematical normalcy of the female mind. 1920 W. G. HARDING in F. L. Allen Only Yesterday (1931) ii. 41 America’s present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration. 1929 G. N. CLARK in S.P.E. Tract XXXIII. 417 If…‘normalcy’ is ever to become an accepted word it will presumably be because the late President Harding did not know any better. 1932 G. K. CHESTERTON Sidelights II. xiv. 182 Life in a modern town, whatever else it is, is not Normalcy. 1939 John o’ London’s 9 June 369/1 That insistent normalcy of men who cannot afford to permit themselves to be thrown off balance. 1951 M. MCLUHAN Mech. Bride 47/1 Professor Kinsey’s surveys, with their economist-like normalcy charts. 1957 V. J. KEHOE Technique Film & T.V. Make-up i. 17 On stage, where strong lights and distance of the actors from the audience wash out and flatten the features, make-up restores to the face the look of normalcy in both color and contour. 1965 New Statesman 7 May 733/1 A kind of spectral normalcy."
Sounds like a word that has crept over from mathematics. Shun it…Shun it, I say!!
Man, I hate it when people think they can just make up words, like they’re God or something. I tell you: if it ain’t in the Bible, it ain’t a real word!
