"A return to normalcy" was United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 presidential

President of the United States

The President of the United States of America is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces....

 candidate Warren G. Harding

Warren G. Harding

Warren Gamaliel Harding was the 29th President of the United States . A Republican from Ohio, Harding was an influential self-made newspaper publisher. He served in the Ohio Senate , as the 28th Lieutenant Governor of Ohio and as a U.S. Senator...

’s campaign promise in the election of 1920

United States presidential election, 1920

The United States presidential election of 1920 was dominated by the aftermath of World War I and a hostile response to certain policies of Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic president. The wartime economic boom had collapsed. Politicians were arguing over peace treaties and the question of America's...

. Although detractors believed that the word was a neologism as well as a malapropism

Malapropism

A malapropism is an act of misusing or the habitual misuse of similar sounding words, especially with humorous results. An example is Yogi Berra's statement: "Texas has a lot of electrical votes," rather than "electoral votes".-Etymology:...

  coined by Harding (as opposed to the more accepted term normality

Normality

Normality may refer to:* The property of conforming to a norm; see normality , assimilation * Normality The state of dynamic equilibrium between all the bio-psycho-social parameters of the individual and the surrounding bio-psycho-social environment...

), there was contemporary discussion and evidence found that normalcy had been listed in dictionaries as far back as 1857.

External links

• "Normalcy", The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, 3rd ed., edited by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. ISBN 0618226478.
• "A Time for Normalcy" by Evan Jenkins, Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 2002.