Not long ago, I was reading, in a magazine profile, a physical description of a person “who has a prodigious white beard, wavy gray bangs, and dark, beetling eyebrows.” A photo of the person was included, and as I looked, I admired the efficiency of the description. Part of its efficiency was that it did not say that the man had two arms and a nose; these details were assumed, and if his appearance was otherwise, it would surely have been noted.
On the front page of The New York Times a few Sundays later was a description of an eight-year-old boy. The boy was reading the first Harry Potter book. He was learning how to cook, and liked to make grilled cheese sandwiches. He had been given twenty dollars to go to Starbucks with his siblings after school, which would mark his first time ordering on his own. These details might not have been worth noting, or made him distinguishable from any number of other boys, if he had not been killed that day at school by a mass shooter. While reflecting on these two characterizations, it occurred to me that when one describes something, one is also describing how the described deviates from the norm, and therefore also describing what is and is not normal.
