The word “normalcy” may seem perfectly normal, but it’s not. Its two chief oddities are that it is having its 100th 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 16th 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 19th 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.
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