‘Is Nicky Morgan too “normal” to be the next prime minister?’ asked someone in the Daily Telegraph. That would make her abnormally normal, I suppose, at least for a PM. ‘Who and what dictates what is normal?’ asked Justine Greening, the International Development Secretary, earlier this year, but, like jesting Pilate, did not stay for an answer. She posed the question because she does not like communities where ‘women normally stay at home, they normally get married very early, they normally wouldn’t vote, they normally don’t run a business’. They have been warned.
Yet most people would prefer not to have an abnormal heartbeat, no matter how far out of the ordinary their opinions were. Normal in the sense of ‘ordinary’ became common in English from about 1840, so the Oxford English Dictionary noted in 1907 when it got around to words beginning with n.
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