From Emily Menon Bender on Facebook today, with a bit of the menu at the restaurant Medici in Normal, in Normal IL:
[with EMB’s comment:] I’d keep making these puns too if I lived here
This following on a passing reference in my posting yesterday “Me lookee, no findee” to Kutztown State Normal School (as it was when I was a child), a state-supported teachers college in Kutztown PA, now Kutztown State University (that’s Kutz rhyming with puts, by the way; if you pronounce it to rhyme with putts, then in Pa. Dutch English, you’re talking about Barftown)
And with #1 echoing a famous headline announcing:
Oblong Man Marries Normal Woman
Oblong is a village in Crawford County IL. And Normal (as in #1) is a town in McLean County IL.
About Normal IL. From Wikipedia:
… As of the 2020 census, the town’s population was 52,736 [AZ: that is, about the size of Palo Alto CA]. Normal is the smaller of two principal cities of the Bloomington–Normal metropolitan area, and is Illinois’ seventh most populous community outside the Chicago metropolitan area. The main campus of Illinois’ oldest public university, Illinois State University, a fully accredited four-year institution, is in Normal
… The town was laid out with the name North Bloomington on June 7, 1854, by Joseph Parkinson
… The town was renamed Normal in February 1865 and officially incorporated on February 25, 1867. The name was taken from Illinois State Normal University, a normal school (teacher-training institution) located there [NOAD: normal school ‘formerly, a school or college for the training of teachers’]. The school has since been renamed Illinois State University after becoming a general four-year university.
And about the term normal school. From Wikipedia:
The term normal school originated in the early 17th century from the French école normale. The French concept of an école normale was to provide a model school with model classrooms to teach model teaching practices to its student teachers, and thereby to set the norm for the profession of teaching.
… The first public normal school in the United States was founded in Concord, Vermont by Samuel Read Hall in 1823 to train teachers. In 1839, the first state-supported normal school was established by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on the northeast corner of the historic Lexington Battle Green; it evolved into Framingham State University. The first modern teacher training school in China was established by educator Sheng Xuanhuai in 1895 as the normal school of the Nanyang Public School (now Shanghai Jiao Tong University) in Shanghai during the Qing dynasty.
Several comprehensive public or state-supported universities — such as UCLA in the United States and Beijing Normal University in China — began as normal schools and later expanded their faculties and programs to become research universities. Some of these universities, particularly in Asia, retain the word “Normal” in their name, highlighting their historical purpose.