Warren G Harding's coining of the word, "normalcy" is 100 years old this year

The word “normalcy” may seem perfectly normal, but it’s not. Its two chief oddities are that it is having its 100^th birthday this year and that it was created by an American president. 

Normality, which means the same thing as normalcy, has been around since the 16^th century. It was a term for a 90-degree angle in carpentry and carried the second meaning of the way we know it today, as the state of conforming to some generally agreed-upon set of expectations. “Normalcy” only comes into use with Warren G. Harding’s presidential campaign of 1922. 

 

There were some uses of “normalcy” in expressing a sense of the perpendicular in carpentry through the 19^th century, but the way it is known today only begins with Harding’s plea for a “Return to Normalcy” after World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic. The coining was successful, as it resides in all major dictionaries and relative to “normality” is the preferred usage for many Americans. According to a Google search hit count, however, “normality” outperforms “normalcy” ten to one.

 

My ear prefers “normalcy” to “normality” if I wish to imply something welcome. If it is a safe and warm place of manageable, predictable equilibrium, then “normalcy” it is. If I am characterizing a rigidly off-putting adherence to irrelevant social hierarchies, “normality” might be preferred. There’s a certain jeer to it that fits an invective a little better. 

 

As a prescriptivist, I’m supposed to hear “normalcy” as a bombastic neologism fit only for corrupt presidents (he did help free Eugene Debs, which cuts a lot of ice with me and bears mentioning), but in my opinion there’s better music to  “normalcy” than its more correct counterpart. Unless I went to throw a barb at some icon of conformism, like that corrupt philanderer, Warren G. Harding, I don’t normally use “normality.” As a general rule, both normalcy and normality are to be avoided as descriptions of individuals, mostly because no one is or was normal, Warren G. Harding included. He was a weirdo.

Homonyms, homographs, homophones, oh my!

While there is some disagreement about the distinction between homonyms and homophones, no bar fights have ever broken out over homographs, that is to say, words that are spelled alike but mean different things. 

Punch, for instance. Whether thrown or drunk, “punch” is spelled the same way. It is a homograph pair whose two meanings are pronounced the same. Some homographs sound different, as in describing the brevity of sixty seconds as a minute minute, but even with that second feature (usually one more than is needed to begin a dispute), few grammarians, however sad and lonely, raise an objection to the blanket statement that all word pairs with identical spelling and disparate senses qualify as homographs. 

 

Many homographs are also homophones, which are characterized by their sounding alike, as in the two versions of “punch” above. They are spelled alike and they sound alike, but they mean different things, so they fit the requirements of both categories. "Minute" and "minute" as described in the previous paragraph qualify as a homograph pairs but not as homophones. 

 

I made allusion to some grammar violence in the first paragraph, and homonyms is where you run into it. Many a lip has been bloodied by pinch-nosed prescriptivists who roar into conflict if nastily provoked over the win currently enjoyed by the modern preference of describing both homographs and homophones as homonyms. These hidebound grammar thugs point to the -nym suffix as meaning “name” and as such prefer it to refer only to word pairs that are spelled alike but differ in both pronunciation and meaning. 

 

This notion would provide no distinction then from homograph. The thankfully prevailing view is for homonyms to be the umbrella under which both homographs and homophones reside. In the "all dogs are animals but not all animals are dogs" sort criteria, homonym as a parent category above homograph and homophone serves as a good organizing principle for these grammar terms.

Having cake, eating cake, a phrase's evolution and the Unabomber

Some of the most commonly known quotations are actually misquoted. Here are a few: “Play it again, Sam.” “We're going to need a bigger boat.” “Money is the root of all evil.” These examples’ initial utterance or penning can all be found and examined, and the error can be clearly noted. This makes them misquotes. 

 

Other adjacent categories to misquoting include misattribution and false quoting. The distinction between these two is the existence of a verifiable source. In a typical misattribution, a less-famous person’s bon mot is ascribed to a more-famous person. Voltaire did not write, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Voltaire’s biographer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, coined the expression to describe his outlook on free speech. 

 

In false quoting, some screed or aphorism of unknown origin is falsely assigned to a known wit—George Carlin suffers this mightily. There is a long and dreadful essay that begins, “The paradox of our time in history…” You can find it in a click, and at a glance it is well below Carlin’s standards. False quoting is lampooned to perfection in the iconic Abraham Lincoln meme that reads, “Don't believe everything you read on the internet.”

 

A somewhat different story can be found in, “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.” It feels like misquoted Shakespeare, but it’s not. Its earliest usage appears in 16^th century letters, suggesting it was an idiomatic saying of the time. The expression is most commonly known in contemporary parlance as I have written it here, but that was not always the case. 

 

The current usage became prevalent after the 1930s, when it was commonly delivered as “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.” This logic works in that once eaten, the cake cannot be had. The modern style explains itself by saying once the eating begins, the having stops. Many of literary criticism graduate school’s leading lights have thrashed this one out, so I won’t get into it. What’s interesting is Ted Kaczynski’s involvement in this little usage melee. 

 

In his manifesto—and as a side note, anytime a piece of writing you’ve done is characterized as a manifesto, you’ve probably lost your audience—Ted Kaczynski wrote, “As for the negative consequences of eliminating industrial society, well, you can't eat your cake and have it too.” It was a sufficiently arcane usage for an FBI linguist to take note and turn up the heat on all of the smartypants suspects. Kaczynski was on FBI radar already, and upon the deeper investigation inspired by this “eat/have” variant, investigators found a letter he had written to his mother where he employed the same usage. The FBI had their man. And they ate him too.