The Nature of Normality & The Things We Know

I have been thinking rather a lot lately, and this is part of what I have come up with.

People like normality, at least experientially. That is, we like the everyday life we experience to be normal. Today I will go to work and perhaps finish that project and hopefully not see too many crazy customers; maybe I’ll see the hot chick in HR; I don’t feel like going out tonight, so maybe I’ll stay home and watch the game; gotta remember to pick up some beer on the way home; shit, my rent is due tomorrow and they’ll throw my ass out if I don’t get it in on time; I’ll hit the bank on my way home, and, yeah, I can start reading that book tonight is considered a perfectly normal train of thought. We expect, in fact, to see the future, and what we expect to see is remarkably similar to the past. Fortunately for our psyches, reality often agrees with us, and the future is really just more of the past. And we like it this way.

In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, more than one of the characters marvel that humanity, of all the species and their oddities, has the ability to create boredom. With such an awe-inspiring world around us, we are so frequently simply bored. It is a remarkable ability. It is also necessary. If we spent all day admiring the natural symmetry of a leaf, we would accomplish nothing and quickly starve, or die as a less appreciative but more practical creature had us for dinner. Boredom, and with it the concept of normality, allow us to exist and even think ourselves rational.

Being the intelligent creatures we supposedly are, however, we are aware that we create this necessary normality and almost instantly demand abnormality in the form of excitement. We love stories about superspies and car chases and, of course, lots of explosions and intrigue and drama. But even here we show our distaste for anything outside the norm – the Good Guy fights Evil and prevails. Sometimes the Good Guy is the Good Girl, and sometimes the hero is a tragic or troubled hero, and sometimes the hero dies. But good always triumphs over evil, at least in the metaphorical sense.

We know that good triumphs over evil because it has been drilled into us that good will always triumph over evil. The hero may give his life for the protection of others or the continuation of the Great Struggle Against The Evil Power, but in doing so, defeats the idea that evil wins. Sometimes the Good Guy loses and hangs his head in the defeat of shame, but the mere fact that we sympathize with him – or condemn him for his mistakes – only further supports that we expect Good to Triumph Over Evil. Sometimes we root for the “Bad Guy,” who is in quotes because he’s really not that bad, or because he’s amusing, or because he has redeeming qualities, or because we feel bad for him and his tragic past, or because the Good Guy is so dang perfect we want to see him get a little dirt on his pretty costume. Very few of us root for Evil.

But sometimes, some of the best storytellers show us, Evil – the true Evil, not just badness, but the evil that chills your soul and makes you want to snuggle with someone to have the reassuring presence of another human being near, the evil that lurks at the back of our darkest impulses and that we squelch so completely we can sometimes fool ourselves into thinking it’s gone – well, sometimes evil wins. Evil shows up in the nightmares that wake us in a cold sweat, and when we’re horrified but not surprised to hear of the travesties humans commit upon each other.

We know this capital-e Evil exists and is part of us, and we know even more strongly that most of our nature wants nothing to do with it. It is the impulse to exorcise this evil that prompts our desire for normality. Evil has no place in normality. Nor does greatness, to flip the coin, but it is the price we pay and we are happy to pay it. So long as we do not have to walk that thin and ever-fragile line between greatness and evil, the balance which some call existentialism that exists so far beyond our paltry normality, we are happy.

Sum Literatus

I have been wondering lately, and the nature of these wonderings should tell the reader all he ever need know about the way my mind works. I have been wondering about the role of linguistics in philology. 

I am a scholar; I call myself a philologist.* My passion is for words and their meaning. Where exactly does meaning lie? When do ink marks on a page form letters, and when do those letters form meaningful words - can words on their own be meaningful, or do they require a greater context?

Yes, I am a nerd. I'm fine with that. I study what fascinates me, and these studies draw my time and attention as irresistibly as flowers draw bees. (Given my habit of forgetting to eat and sleep while I work, the flower in question may be more akin to a Venus' fly-trap rather than, say, a daisy.)

But I have no interest in linguistics. On a good day, I could give a hazy kinda-sorta definition of a phoneme, maybe. I don't know what a transitive passive verb form is, nor a "1sg (pronomial) possessor NP with a 3sg non-pronomial possessor NP."** Nor do I care. 

I am vaguely aware that this probably makes me a bad, lazy or selfish scholar. But, my lazy, selfish scholar counters, how do experts get to be experts if not by focussing on what fascinates them? And technical linguistics bores me immensely.

However, linguistics does fall under the general heading of philology. Lately, philology has come to mean the study of words in the context I use - that of words and their meaning. But the technical heading still applies.

So here is my dilemma: do I bore myself with linguistics, thus rounding out my philology? or do I ignore linguistics, possibly selling myself short on information, and instead delight in the discovery that the OED lists Shakespeare as the probable neologist behind generous and other such surprises?

My hope is to aim for a happy middle ground, perhaps more on the side of meaning-weighted philology than exactly in the center, but one which acknowledges the existence and possible value of basic linguistic study while spending the majority of my academic energy on my chosen field of eventual expertise.

*Sentence structure borrowed from Laurie R. King's excellent Beekeeper's Apprentice series, exact book unknown. This citation is probably not important, but I like to give credit where credit is due, at least if it's something worthwhile.

**Actual quote from UPenn's Language Log.