What Does "Normal" Really Mean?

What Does Normal Really Mean?

          After doing my blog about the power of words, Aimee Mullins talked about how when she looked up the word disabled how it listed definitions that really hurt her, because she had never taken the time to look up the actual words’ meaning. (Mullins,2012)  That really got me thinking, what exactly is normal? I had an idea but the dictionary definition is always very different from the meaning that’s in your head. So I looked up normal in the Webster’s on-line dictionary and it had a lot of different categories under the word Normal and they were Psychology, Biology, Medicine/Medical .and Mathematics. Then under each of those were subtopics which were alphabetized. I can already tell that this is not going to be an easy word to find a definition for.

          I looked under the Medicine/Medical section just to see what their definition of normal was because I know that I do not fall under that category. It had an A and B under the words Medicine/Medical. A:free from any infection or other form of disease or malformation, or from experimental therapy or manipulation. B. of natural occurrence”(Webster, 1995) I knew that I was not normal but I did not know exactly how right I was.  Because I would say on a whole I am pretty normal, I do most things that everyone else does, I function throughout the day very successfully, I do not make irrational decisions, such as cursing out loud in class or hitting a fellow student. I consider myself as pretty normal except for the fact that half of my body is impaired significantly. So after reading the dictionary’s definition I said to myself that is not a very practical reasoning.

          Then I want to find out how society labels someone as Normal or not so I went to howstuffworks.com and got a definition that was closer to my definition of Normal and it said that to be normal is to act the same as most people of that society acts. (Scheve, Tom, n.d.) I understood this to mean that if you are a person who has not much personal hygiene that if you were invited to the President’s house; you would clean up nicely, since that would be the norm for that family, which leads perfectly into the next point of this website that as sane human beings we adapt to the different norms in different situations, so it is normal to act in a different manner around a different crowd of people.  

          I now understand more clearly that there is no such thing as a normal person because normal to someone may be very taboo to another.  Basically as long as you do not do anything too drastically different from everyone else and you have working limbs and pretty much fit in the cookie cutter idea of a human and how they should act you are “Normal”. I say the cookie cutter idea because that is how today society works. You do not notice it until you all the sudden don’t fit that anymore, but almost everyone here on the campus of Bethany College has accepted me and my injury, but when I go to Florida to visit my mom that is when I really do feel handicapped. Because that is not the norm for that state but back here it sort of is normal to see good ol’ Sydney the girl who walks funny.

Works Cited

Scheve, Tom.(n.d.) How do we define “Normal”? [web site]

Retrieved from http://how stuffworks.com/define-normal.htm

Mullins, Aimee.(2012) PARALYMPIC RECORD BREAKER, AIMEE MULLINS SEEKS TO REDEFINE THE WORD “DISABLED”[web site]

Retrieved from http://epicvictories.com/athlete-and-actor-aimee-mullins-seeks-out-to-redefine-the-word-disabled-she-instead-is-differently-abled/

Webster (1995) Normal[web site]

Retrieved from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/normal?s=t