Latin Everyday

I was in physics and we were talking about what the “normal” force is. It is written as Fnormal. And on the worksheet that we read Fnormal meant that when the two surfaces touch together they create a perpendicular force from the surface. Knowing our class, we were all confused on exactly what that meant, so Mr. Brown said that normal comes from a Latin root. Norma means standard in Latin and that when two lines are perpendicular then they form a right angle. We still didn’t quite understand it, but after he told us where normal comes from I think we started to get it a lot more and because he connected it to a Latin root that for sure helped me understand it more than others I think. I can’t quite remember the exact words he said when he was referencing normal to Latin but I think that he meant that the latin meaning is kind of like a derivitive of normal actually meant in Physics.

-Lizzie