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
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