Normal People - Again

For reasons too complicated to explain, I found myself over the weekend needing a serious definition of the phrase “normal people”. The flip definition is that a normal person is anyone who protests that there is no such thing as a normal person: genuine misfits, weirdos, addicts and head-cases know damn well that they aren't like everyone else and that normal people exist, even if they are defined negatively. As not having substance- or activity-abuse issues or a DSM IV-strength Personality Disorder – a group of people colloquially known as “screw-ups”. That's the strong sense of normal. The underlying claim is that you simply can't have much in common as regards background, upbringing, specific developmental abuses and personal attitudes with screw-ups without turning into one yourself. There are very few shades of grey between being a screw-up and normal.

There's a slightly weaker sense of the phrase, as it used in such as examples as “Windows 7 boots fast enough for normal people” or “normal people don't read postgraduate mathematics textbooks as culture”. Normal people, in this sense, are not at either end of the Bell curve: neither dumb beyond belief, nor smart enough to actually use LISP in daily problem-solving life. Normal people can do anything that clever or dedicated non-normal people can do, but just not as well. Doing anything really well – from cultivating a garden to chess - requires an amount of dedication, application and practice that is incompatable with a couple of pints with the gang after work, playing with the kids when you get home, paying attention to your partner when (s)he talks about, well, anything that isn't on your agenda, putting in time at the local church, visting friends and family and of course wasting hours watching reality TV (which is what normal people really do with their lives). Channeling Ambrose Bierce for a moment, in this sense, a normal person is a mediocrity whose motives elude you.

Then there's a judgemental sense of the phrase, as in “normal people don't do X”. Normal people don't blow themselves up on a crowded bus, they don't suddenly shout out a word-salad in the middle of supper, nor do they get fall-over drunk on the second date. They don't have mood swings, collect train numbers and they always notice when their lady partner has had a haircut. A “normal person” wouldn't do or say something you've just done or said that the person you're with wishes you hadn't. We can dismiss this sense of the phrase as nothing more than a fancy insult.

The converse compliment to that insult is as in “gee, (insert name of famous person here) was just like a normal person”. As in having no airs, false graces, attitude, extravagent demands, stand-offishness or distance. They said hello and goodbye and helped you carry your shopping to the car because they could see you were struggling.

For me, normal people live in the world but don't feel it under their skin. They can tune it out, let it in one ear and out of the other, and have most things pass them over like water off a duck's back. Occasionally something will rankle with them for longer than they know is healthy, but not often and not for much longer. As a result of this temperament, normal people generally have enough skills to do their job, but don't acquire any more for the sake of it. They don't stick at exercise regimes past three months (except Marathons – running Marathons is very normal as long as you take longer than three-and-a-half hours to do it), they can't play a musical instrument with facility and don't have maths, science or philosophy degrees. Barristers are not normal, nor are musicians, soldiers and athletes. To adapt the only phrase of Tolstoy's that everyone knows: all normal people are normal in the same way, non-normal people are each non-normal in an unique way.