The Evolution Of Normal (Finally!)
So let’s look at this word “normal.” It’s a pretty interesting word! We use it in SO many ways, with multiple layers of connotations that have nothing to do with its original meaning.
We use it to mean “healthy,” as in, “Your blood tests came out normal.”
We use it to mean “common” or “expected,” as in “It’s normal to feel weak and tired after a long bout with the flu.”
We use it to mean “socially acceptable,” or at least “socially predictable,” as in “Why can’t you just listen to pop music like a normal teenager?” (Which was my mom’s response to the constant strains of Mozart and Duke Ellington emerging loudly from my room during my 80‘s teenhood. Heh.)
So what is the original meaning of the word, the one from which all of those others somehow evolved and diverged?
I could half-jokingly say that the answer is written in the stars. Fellow astronomy buffs and lovers of Latin will know what I’m talking about: there’s a small constellation up there that everyone ignores, because it’s neither bright nor large nor on the line of the ecliptic, where the signs of the zodiac live. It’s tucked away in a tiny space between Lupus (the Wolf) and Ara (the Altar), and its name is Norma.
No, it’s not supposed to be a girl. It’s a carpenter’s square.
Recite it with me now, all you former (and current) Latin students: norma, normae, f. - square, a carpenter’s tool for measuring right angles.
Builders (and mathematicians, too) love right angles. They’re just so aesthetically pleasing! Practical, too, if you’re building a house. (Even though they’re actually not as stable as they look; triangular shapes are much better at staying rigid than square ones - hence the great stability of the geodesic dome.)
But (in case you hadn’t noticed), people are not houses. Or mathematical abstractions, for that matter. So why stick that epithet on us?
Well, it’s a fairly easy slide - in the metaphorical ways that humans tend to think about language - from “properly square” in the literal sense to a more symbolic usage like, say, “according to rule.”
(Remember, too, that the Romans really liked rules, about as much as carpenters like right angles. Roman society was built on a highly rigid and inflexible model, bound to a strongly hierarchical system of both political and social status. Remember that the next time you hear someone conflate “ancient Greece and Rome” as if they were very similar cultures - think “fiercely independent city-states” versus “centrally-controlled mega-empire” and it’ll all make sense!)
At any rate, the many other layers of meaning really all hark back to that original idea. And juxtapositions of these meanings show up in some pretty interesting ways.
Remember that bugaboo of teachers and students everywhere, the so-called Normal Curve, also famously known as the Bell Curve? In statistics, a “normal curve” is simply a graph in which the mean (the average value of all the numbers represented), the median (the arithmetic midpoint of that set of numbers) and the mode (the number that shows up most often in the set) are all the same. So, for instance, if the numerical test grades in a class of five students are, say, 50, 100, and three 75‘s: the mean (add ‘em all up and divide by 5) is 75, the median (middle grade) is 75, and the mode (most frequent grade) is also 75 - and voila... it’s a normal curve!
Need I point out how beautifully symmetrical this is? (The name “bell curve,” in fact, derives from the lovely shape of such a graph on paper.) And boy oh boy, do we humans love symmetry! (Seems to me I’ve mentioned that before...) It’s only “logical” to assume that human performance levels must naturally fit into this kind of a curve, right? A few very high performers, a few very low ones - about the same number of each - and a great big hump of “averageness” in the middle! The idea is that, if we were grading all of humanity, this is how the graph would naturally turn out... and therefore we can (and, for fairness, should) forcibly recreate it in miniature with any smaller statistical sample. Thus the process of “grading on a curve” was born: mapping students’ actual scores - the real test results - onto a bell curve shape (regardless of whether or not they actually fit that shape) in order to assign letter grades in a nicely predictable and symmetrical distribution (not too many A’s, not too many F’s).
There are several problems with this, of course. For instance, that it intentionally obscures actual data... or that, as recent studies have shown, human performance actually DOESN’T naturally fit into a bell curve! But the big objection for me is that it tries to make reality fit into an abstraction, on the assumption that reality SHOULD fit there.
And there - for me, at least - is the crux of the problem of “normal”: that it has become, not merely an assessment of results, or even an expectation, but an actual prescription that we try to fill... a law that says “Thou Shalt.” We even try to change reality in order to “square it” with an abstract image.
Of course, this sort of thing was happening long before we ever had a word to describe it. But the power of that word - NORMAL - should not be underestimated. Because we have somehow attached a MORAL judgment to the idea of “normal”; that which is “abnormal" must be, not merely undesirable, but actually bad, wrong, untrustworthy, even disgusting - i.e., “dirty” in the religious sense of “unclean.” And this happens even when there doesn’t seem to really be anything particularly moral OR immoral (in terms of respect or disrespect, ethical or unethical, good or harm, etc.) about any of the choices involved. And so the implication of “moral” gets to sneak in under the radar with the word “normal.”
Look at sex, for instance. If only sex between a formally pair-bonded male and female for purposes of procreation is “normal” (i.e., what most people do - leaving aside, for the moment, the question of whether or not this is true!), then all other kinds of sex are by definition “abnormal” - but instead of thinking about those “abnormal” forms as simply being statistically deviant, outliers on the graph, society tends to consider them morally deviant: perverted, inverted, subverted... dirty, bad, evil.
And its not just sex that we treat that way. I will never forget reading a particular chapter in Marie Killilea’s Karen, the memoir of a mother raising a child with cerebral palsy in the 1940‘s, when most such persons were routinely hidden away in institutions. At a rest stop on a long trip to a medical specialist, the family meets some kindly folks who inquire about the “sick” child - but upon discovering that Karen has, not a passing illness, but a genetic infirmity, they suddenly turn cold and want nothing more to do with the “dirty” people who could have an abnormal child like that!
While most objectors today would be more circumspect about it, I doubt there’s any parent of a physically, emotionally, or mentally challenged child who hasn’t felt something akin to that kind of judgment behind some random person’s silent look of disapproval.
This creeps into even in the most mundane and meaningless places. My grandfather, brought up in a age when “decent” men were clean-shaven, does not like men with beards, no matter how neatly kept: “It just looks like they're a dirty person,” he complains. And there are people out there who still believe that for a woman to choose not to shave her legs is a seriously wrong thing - not just “unattractive” as per the dictates of current fashion, but actually physically revolting!
If you think there’s no danger in this, just an amusing human idiosyncrasy... remember the Salem witch trials, in which the presence of any body irregularity (especially any protuberance that could be imaginatively interpreted as an extra nipple, anywhere on the body) might be seen as a mark of the devil?
For that matter, how many modern-day hate crimes are excused by their perpetrators on the basis of the victim being somehow "abnormal" - in other words, unworthy of the rights or respect that a "normal" (white, cisgender, straight, non-handicapped, etc) person has?
We all know there’s no way we’re going to throw out the concept of “normal.” But one thing we can do is to remind ourselves, and keep reminding ourselves - and remind others, too - of where the word began. “Normal” is, in its essence, a mathematical concept - in fact, a mathematical construct, since the abstractions of math rarely have any real existence in the solid world. They are useful, but they do not describe reality.
We need a New Normal. One that says, “It’s normal that people are all different, in small ways and in large ways.” “It’s normal that not everybody fits the mold.” We know this... but do we know it deeply enough, at gut level? Do we see it in the world every day? Or is it just an intellectual understanding?
Few of us really have a resting temperature of exactly 98-point-6. Many of us have loving, healthy, mutually satisfying interpersonal relationships that run counter to the social majority. And no classroom anywhere ever had a set of kids who perfectly fit the bell curve.
Hell, some of us - shhhhh! - don’t even have a gender identity that fits our sex organs!
But did I say “Shhhhh”? I take it back. Let’s shout it from the rooftops, if we dare.
Because conventional wisdom is not the same as Truth... any more than a human being is the same as a house. And some walls just need knocking down!
We use it to mean “healthy,” as in, “Your blood tests came out normal.”
We use it to mean “common” or “expected,” as in “It’s normal to feel weak and tired after a long bout with the flu.”
We use it to mean “socially acceptable,” or at least “socially predictable,” as in “Why can’t you just listen to pop music like a normal teenager?” (Which was my mom’s response to the constant strains of Mozart and Duke Ellington emerging loudly from my room during my 80‘s teenhood. Heh.)
So what is the original meaning of the word, the one from which all of those others somehow evolved and diverged?
I could half-jokingly say that the answer is written in the stars. Fellow astronomy buffs and lovers of Latin will know what I’m talking about: there’s a small constellation up there that everyone ignores, because it’s neither bright nor large nor on the line of the ecliptic, where the signs of the zodiac live. It’s tucked away in a tiny space between Lupus (the Wolf) and Ara (the Altar), and its name is Norma.
No, it’s not supposed to be a girl. It’s a carpenter’s square.
Recite it with me now, all you former (and current) Latin students: norma, normae, f. - square, a carpenter’s tool for measuring right angles.
Builders (and mathematicians, too) love right angles. They’re just so aesthetically pleasing! Practical, too, if you’re building a house. (Even though they’re actually not as stable as they look; triangular shapes are much better at staying rigid than square ones - hence the great stability of the geodesic dome.)
But (in case you hadn’t noticed), people are not houses. Or mathematical abstractions, for that matter. So why stick that epithet on us?
Well, it’s a fairly easy slide - in the metaphorical ways that humans tend to think about language - from “properly square” in the literal sense to a more symbolic usage like, say, “according to rule.”
(Remember, too, that the Romans really liked rules, about as much as carpenters like right angles. Roman society was built on a highly rigid and inflexible model, bound to a strongly hierarchical system of both political and social status. Remember that the next time you hear someone conflate “ancient Greece and Rome” as if they were very similar cultures - think “fiercely independent city-states” versus “centrally-controlled mega-empire” and it’ll all make sense!)
At any rate, the many other layers of meaning really all hark back to that original idea. And juxtapositions of these meanings show up in some pretty interesting ways.
Remember that bugaboo of teachers and students everywhere, the so-called Normal Curve, also famously known as the Bell Curve? In statistics, a “normal curve” is simply a graph in which the mean (the average value of all the numbers represented), the median (the arithmetic midpoint of that set of numbers) and the mode (the number that shows up most often in the set) are all the same. So, for instance, if the numerical test grades in a class of five students are, say, 50, 100, and three 75‘s: the mean (add ‘em all up and divide by 5) is 75, the median (middle grade) is 75, and the mode (most frequent grade) is also 75 - and voila... it’s a normal curve!
Need I point out how beautifully symmetrical this is? (The name “bell curve,” in fact, derives from the lovely shape of such a graph on paper.) And boy oh boy, do we humans love symmetry! (Seems to me I’ve mentioned that before...) It’s only “logical” to assume that human performance levels must naturally fit into this kind of a curve, right? A few very high performers, a few very low ones - about the same number of each - and a great big hump of “averageness” in the middle! The idea is that, if we were grading all of humanity, this is how the graph would naturally turn out... and therefore we can (and, for fairness, should) forcibly recreate it in miniature with any smaller statistical sample. Thus the process of “grading on a curve” was born: mapping students’ actual scores - the real test results - onto a bell curve shape (regardless of whether or not they actually fit that shape) in order to assign letter grades in a nicely predictable and symmetrical distribution (not too many A’s, not too many F’s).
There are several problems with this, of course. For instance, that it intentionally obscures actual data... or that, as recent studies have shown, human performance actually DOESN’T naturally fit into a bell curve! But the big objection for me is that it tries to make reality fit into an abstraction, on the assumption that reality SHOULD fit there.
And there - for me, at least - is the crux of the problem of “normal”: that it has become, not merely an assessment of results, or even an expectation, but an actual prescription that we try to fill... a law that says “Thou Shalt.” We even try to change reality in order to “square it” with an abstract image.
Of course, this sort of thing was happening long before we ever had a word to describe it. But the power of that word - NORMAL - should not be underestimated. Because we have somehow attached a MORAL judgment to the idea of “normal”; that which is “abnormal" must be, not merely undesirable, but actually bad, wrong, untrustworthy, even disgusting - i.e., “dirty” in the religious sense of “unclean.” And this happens even when there doesn’t seem to really be anything particularly moral OR immoral (in terms of respect or disrespect, ethical or unethical, good or harm, etc.) about any of the choices involved. And so the implication of “moral” gets to sneak in under the radar with the word “normal.”
Look at sex, for instance. If only sex between a formally pair-bonded male and female for purposes of procreation is “normal” (i.e., what most people do - leaving aside, for the moment, the question of whether or not this is true!), then all other kinds of sex are by definition “abnormal” - but instead of thinking about those “abnormal” forms as simply being statistically deviant, outliers on the graph, society tends to consider them morally deviant: perverted, inverted, subverted... dirty, bad, evil.
And its not just sex that we treat that way. I will never forget reading a particular chapter in Marie Killilea’s Karen, the memoir of a mother raising a child with cerebral palsy in the 1940‘s, when most such persons were routinely hidden away in institutions. At a rest stop on a long trip to a medical specialist, the family meets some kindly folks who inquire about the “sick” child - but upon discovering that Karen has, not a passing illness, but a genetic infirmity, they suddenly turn cold and want nothing more to do with the “dirty” people who could have an abnormal child like that!
While most objectors today would be more circumspect about it, I doubt there’s any parent of a physically, emotionally, or mentally challenged child who hasn’t felt something akin to that kind of judgment behind some random person’s silent look of disapproval.
This creeps into even in the most mundane and meaningless places. My grandfather, brought up in a age when “decent” men were clean-shaven, does not like men with beards, no matter how neatly kept: “It just looks like they're a dirty person,” he complains. And there are people out there who still believe that for a woman to choose not to shave her legs is a seriously wrong thing - not just “unattractive” as per the dictates of current fashion, but actually physically revolting!
If you think there’s no danger in this, just an amusing human idiosyncrasy... remember the Salem witch trials, in which the presence of any body irregularity (especially any protuberance that could be imaginatively interpreted as an extra nipple, anywhere on the body) might be seen as a mark of the devil?
For that matter, how many modern-day hate crimes are excused by their perpetrators on the basis of the victim being somehow "abnormal" - in other words, unworthy of the rights or respect that a "normal" (white, cisgender, straight, non-handicapped, etc) person has?
We all know there’s no way we’re going to throw out the concept of “normal.” But one thing we can do is to remind ourselves, and keep reminding ourselves - and remind others, too - of where the word began. “Normal” is, in its essence, a mathematical concept - in fact, a mathematical construct, since the abstractions of math rarely have any real existence in the solid world. They are useful, but they do not describe reality.
We need a New Normal. One that says, “It’s normal that people are all different, in small ways and in large ways.” “It’s normal that not everybody fits the mold.” We know this... but do we know it deeply enough, at gut level? Do we see it in the world every day? Or is it just an intellectual understanding?
Few of us really have a resting temperature of exactly 98-point-6. Many of us have loving, healthy, mutually satisfying interpersonal relationships that run counter to the social majority. And no classroom anywhere ever had a set of kids who perfectly fit the bell curve.
Hell, some of us - shhhhh! - don’t even have a gender identity that fits our sex organs!
But did I say “Shhhhh”? I take it back. Let’s shout it from the rooftops, if we dare.
Because conventional wisdom is not the same as Truth... any more than a human being is the same as a house. And some walls just need knocking down!
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