Should we be using the word normal?

Written By Lauren Payne

“Normal” is a word we use in everyday conversation. Just this morning, as I made my coffee, I started thinking about this. Not long after I made my first cup, I made two more. When my partner noticed this, he said drinking three coffees before midday wasn’t normal. I sat there and thought about what he said for a moment. He didn’t realise that it actually is normal for me to have three coffees in the morning. Really, doing this just wasn’t normal for him. I wondered: What is considered to be normal differs from person to person. What is very normal for me, isn’t normal for somebody else. So why do we use this expression?  Why do we use the word “normal” as if everyone in the world universally agreed on it’s definition?  And what does “normal” actually mean?

The origins of the word 

I decided to investigate the history of the word a bit more, to understand why and how we use it. 

The word “normal” is derived from the Latin normalis, meaning “made according to a carpenter’s square, or forming a right angle”. According to Mirriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, in Late Latin, normalis was given many new meanings, including “according to rule” and  “according to, constituting, or not deviating from an established norm, rule, or principle.” In his dictionary The New World of English Words, author Edward Phillips defined “normal” in the 17th century as “done exactly, according to the rule, or square”. Reading through these historical definitions certainly gives us the impression that the word “normal” has transformed. While the original Latin meaning was only related to rules, the word “normal” had a more oppressive meaning by the 17th century. 

It made me wonder, how did the meaning of the word “normal” evolve from being factual, to describing an ideal state? 

Author Johnathan Mooney explains in his book Normal Sucks: How to Love, Learn, and Thrive Outside the Lines, that “normal” is “a word that masquerades as an ever-present universal truth.” He says when the word was first used in Latin, it had “nothing to do with people, or society, or human behaviour.” 

Norm, normal and normalis were words primarily used by Latin mathematicians. These were distinct words in geometry (especially normalis) to describe a right angle. Mooney explains that over time, it became “a universal mathematical truth” that a right angle is considered to be a perfect angle.  

According to Mooney, this is where the meaning of the word “normal” became “both a fact in the world and a judgement of what is right.”

Using the word “normal” was later adopted by academics in comparative anatomy and physiology. These academics studied the human body and used the term “normal state” to describe functioning organs and systems. 

 
 

Average = Perfect = Normal

In 1713, the Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli (who many consider to be the founder of modern-day calculus and statistics) created the calculus of probabilities. This equation was then taken up by statistical thinker Aldophe Quetelet, who applied the equation to human beings. In 1835, Quetelet wanted to gather large amounts of statistical data to calculate the most commonly occurring features of the “average man”, but here’s the vital flaw of this plan - Quetelet believed his “average man” was also the perfect man (there’s that word again!).  

In his research, Quetelet used the words “normal”, “regular” and “average” interchangeably. In his mind, normal, average and regular all meant perfect. For the record, his research also excluded people with disabilities and people of colour. As Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens wrote in their book, Normality: A Critical Genealogy, Quetelet’s work did “all that it could to reduce the gap between the actual and the normal/ideal.”

English statistician Francis Galton later updated statistical theory and created today’s concept of normality based on Quetelet’s work. Galton used this theory to create a new idea of normal that he thought everyone in society should be on board with.

Luckily for him, in the late 18th and early 19th century, his idea of normality was applied to the public health system, schools, the industrial economy, and many other pockets of society. This is the definition of “normal” we’ve used ever since. 

But what’s normal, anyway?

So, as history shows, the word “normal” was originally used to describe a fact, but was recoined by statisticians to describe what is perfect. Today, the Cambridge English Dictionary defines the word “normal” as “ordinary or usual; the same as would be expected.” Thus, normal is still being used to describe the ideal state, and mirrors the expectations of society. 

This way it is, however, exclusionary and derogatory to people who don’t fit into the statistical idea of normal. 

So, should we abandon the word “normal”?

I believe we should. Like art, normal is subjective. What is normal for one person isn’t normal for another. The word “normal” suggests there’s a standard of which someone isn’t living up to. It’s a narrow-minded term and as we now know, was created by statisticians who created their own idea of what normality is. The word has changed significantly since Galton developed his definition of “normal”. In his mind, if you fall into any minority group, you don’t fit into the standards of normal and need to be corrected. People with disabilities, who have a larger body type, who identify as queer, who don’t speak a country’s main language, or who belong to a different religion to the majority, are still shunned today because they’re not “normal”. We speak of accepting people no matter who they are and where they come from, but still use the word “normal” to describe an extremely outdated idea of perfectionism. 

Let’s remove the word “normal” from our vocabularies and replace it with average, common, usual, or typical. These words all state a fact and don’t exclude people from their definitions.  

References and further reading 

Lauren Payne

I’m Lauren, a writer who’s currently based in Australia, but has family in Aachen, a beautiful part of Germany. I’m fascinated by psychology and how our brains affect the way we are. I write a lot of personal essays, investigative articles, and reviews about everything from music to sociology.

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