This one made me go, “Ha! Take that, everyone who uses the word I don’t like!” 😉
See, I was always a normality girl. But more and more often I’d begun hearing normalcy. And it drove me batty. Here, my friends, is why.
Normality itself is a relatively new word, entering the written world of English in only 1849. It most likely came from the French normalité, which became a borrowed word in 1834. Meaning exactly what you’d expect.
Normalcy, however, dates from 1857. And what, you ask, did it mean? “Being at right angles.” It’s a mathematical term! In the 1920s President Harding used it in place of normality in a speech describing the political situation and was liberally made fun of for his incompetency with speaking. Since then it has edged its way in more and more, but “the word prefered by purists [read: Roseanna, LOL] for “a normal situation” is normality.”
So there. 😉
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.
Yay! Welcome to the Light Side! 😉
This makes me laugh! I now want to correct everyone who says "normalcy". 🙂 I can't read that word anymore. You have made my brain do the switch.
No no, it's that it had a totally different meaning altogether until someone MISused it in that way, LOL. By that argument, "nucular" ought to be an acceptable variation of "nuclear" 😉
So, as a purist, you get upset by difference of eight years? lol, Personally I'm on the side where it is has that definition now, even if not then.