the.com/abnormality
The art of being the data point that ruins everyone's nice clean average.
means A quality or feature that deviates from what's typical, normal, or expected — the outlier trait or condition that stands apart from the baseline.
from Built from Latin 'ab' (away from) plus 'norma' (a carpenter's square, a rule or pattern) — so literally 'away from the square,' away from the standard everything else is measured against. The 'b' in 'abnormal' actually crept in later by confusion with the unrelated Greek-rooted word 'anomalous'; the earlier English form was 'anormal,' straight from French. So even the word's own history is a little bit irregular — fittingly.
- statistics view
- defined by distance from the mean, not morality
- medical usage
- often found incidentally, never when you're looking
- etymology
- from Latin norma, meaning carpenter's square
- irony
- everyone has one, so it's basically normal