Henrietta Hay's Column

Normal. Word of many uses. If you have a two year old, normal means a temp of 98.6. If you're in the doctor's office, it means that you can sigh with relief. If you are a politician planning the next election it means everybody who agrees with you.

The dictionary says, "Conforming with, adhering to, or constituting a norm, standard, pattern, level, or type; typical," or, in the vernacular, the state of being just like everybody else.

What a horrible thought! How dull and boring life would be if everybody were just like everybody else. What if we all thought the same thoughts, belonged to the same political party, ate the same food, went to the same church, watched the same television shows, played golf?

The other more common meaning of "normal" is "just average." There is a new book called, "Are You Normal?" which asks "Do you conform to a type, standard or pattern the way MOST Americans do?" Bernice Kanner and a research team asked a lot of people a lot of questions and found some patterns of behavior. Since there were 248,709,873 of us in the 1990 census, however, the answers do not give a final definition of normal.

For example, more of us are ophidiophobics than arachnophobics. In other words, more of us are scared stiff of snakes than are scared of spiders. I could have told them that. Other things that bother "normal" Americans are getting fat, exposure to heights, going to the dentist or making a speech. About 45 percent of men and 53 percent of women consider making a speech the scariest thing of all. And about a third of us are afraid of flying.

As a lifelong cake-eater I was intrigued by the question of cake and frosting. Less than 3 percent of us eat both of them together. Most people, taking Marie Antoinette's words literally, eat the cake first. Younger people are more into instant gratification and tend to eat the frosting first.

The author asked how we react if another driver cuts us off. Over half of us do nothing. 15 percent shout an obscenity and the rest of us release tension in a variety of anti-social ways. I have noticed a sexual difference in reactions. When another driver does something stupid I assume it's a man and mentally shout, "Back off, Junior." Men drivers, on the other hand, usually wonder out loud where that broad learned to drive.

Here is one that really surprises me. More than half of us drive with one hand. The other hand is out the window, on the gearshift, fiddling with the radio, putting on make-up or holding a cellular phone. Now that is really scary. I marvel at drivers on television shows. They are always maintaining an eye contact conversation with their passengers or checking the kids in the back seat or gazing at a soccer game over to the left. They seldom look at the road, but never crash into anybody. Wonder how they do that.

It is reported that most women would rather eat glass than leave the house without make-up and 45 percent of them spend at least fifteen minutes a day applying it. Only 22 percent of males use electric shavers and they wander all over the house while shaving. The rest lather up in the bathroom.

In the course of checking on whether we have been known to re-cycle gifts we can't use, the author repeats the common knowledge that there are just a dozen fruit cakes in the world -- passing from one gift basket to another.

I have done a little research of my own into normalcy, with questions like, "Do you shampoo at the beginning or end of a shower?" and "Do you hang blouses and jackets facing left or right?" And "Do you ever sneak a peak at the last page of a novel while you are reading it?" But I quit when I discovered I wasn't normal.

My favorite psychologist finally gave me a definition of "normal" that makes sense. He says that normal is almost anything we do that doesn't get us arrested.