This evening I was having dinner with some friends, one of whom was Paul Debevec. We were discussing the cultural shift in the general acceptance of smoking in public, and Paul remarked that smoking had become denormalized.
One of the people at the table really liked the word “denormalized”, and wanted to know exactly what it meant. Paul explained that he had meant it in the sense of a shift in what is generally considered to be normal behavior.
So I asked him, if everyone should some day start smoking again, whether we could then say that smoking had become renormalized.
Paul, tapping effortlessly into his inner computer graphics nerd, replied: “The norm always divides us.”
I agreed, adding: “And then it makes us one.”