[lit-ideas] Memoirs D'Une Normalienne (Was: Diary of a Public School Girl
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 13:55:25 EDT
Candle in the Wind: *Norma* Jeane Mortenson (Was: *Normal* Schooling?)
The OED reads for 'normal':
‘which serves as a model’ (1793 in école normale)
and which incidentally gives the date for the first collocation of the
expression.
école normale school for the training of teachers,
the first of which was set up by decree in 1794,
and later became dedicated to training teachers for
secondary education and thus (from 1845) called
the Ecole Normale Supérieure.
I suppose in those revolutionary days it was quite a task to 'set the model'
-- Imagine burning all the history books making an icon of Marie Antoinette
and all that. Palma was yet not born, but he gets the feeling.
It should not surprise us then that the first use was in "American" English.
There's also a quote from an Edinburgh review which only goes to show that
the Scots always felt closer to the French than to the English -- as I hope
you'll agree if you've seen, as I did yesterday, Cate Blanchet's "Elizabeth:
the
golden age" -- Beautiful:
1834 Edinb. Rev. July 491 The system of Primary Schools, which the
French..have..denominated Normal.
The only English-based quotes are the tricky one about "the Normal School of
Design" which we are not told when it was found, but I'm not so interested
now guessing that the idea was that it was to be a 'model' (for other
schools?):
1960 S. J. CURTIS & M. E. A. BOULTWOOD Introd. Hist. Eng. Educ. xii. 278
The Normal School of Design became the Royal College of Art in 1896.
and this one from "Holy Terror" (1939) by Wells. Wells was an acid, resented
character as he tried to make his way into the intelligentsia, so I would
take his remarks with a 'pinch of salt', as the normaliennes would say:
"An increasing number of women are taking up professions now; at
architecture, catering, various industries, normal teaching..they are
practically as
good as men or better."
No, that this is a girl-thing should be clear by the fact that only "Norma"
in the feminine is a first-name, never Normo, or Normus.
Cheers,
JL
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