Posted: 9/16/2004 7:02:33 AM EDT
[#12]
Quoted: I thought it was Calvin Coolidge who invented 'normalcy.'
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I stand somewhat corrected. Neither Coolidge nor Harding invented it, but Harding popularized it. Harding's normalcy is perhaps the most successful
presidential word. The O.E.D. has it from 1857, but the
word did not take flight until Harding used it in a stump
speech in his 1920 presidential campaign: ''America's
present need is not heroics but healing, not nostrums but
normalcy, not revolution but restoration.''
The word Harding might have used, normality, made its debut
in 1849, in Edgar Allen Poe's ''Eureka.'' But Harding was
notoriously ill spoken. He so fractured the language that
H. L. Mencken dubbed Harding's English ''Gamalielese,''
alluding to Harding's middle name, Gamaliel. Of Harding's
speech, Mencken wrote, ''It reminds me of stale bean soup,
of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through
endless nights.'' It is said that when Harding got to the
word normality in the course of reading the speech, he
misread it as ''normalty,'' then mispronounced that. Out
came normalcy. The press noticed, so Harding repeated it
throughout the campaign, which adopted ''Return to Normalcy'' as its
slogan.
I asked Fred Shapiro, editor of the coming Yale Dictionary
of Quotations, to check recent data for normalcy vs.
normality. From his search of Nexis, the vast
newspaper-and-magazine database, for all occurrences of
these words in July 2002, the score was normalcy 308,
normality 289. Harding's normalcy not only stuck (and
helped win him the presidency), but it now seems to be
ousting its senior synonym.
| web.sunybroome.edu/~stoner_r/ENG111NYTnuclear.htm
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