Just In Time

Consider how much work the word time does. We say a phone call is just in time, literally, justly inside it like an ambulance or a reprieve. We say someone is on time by the clock, punctual, reliable, trains on tracks.

We say a person is ahead of the times or behind the times and notice that “times” has multiplied like a times table. And in a literary or religious register we call something or someone beyond time, meaning it or they have escaped physics.

In, on, ahead, behind, beyond. Five prepositions, five different ways of locating a human being just in time, and there are probably many more, at a time before, etc., etc. Time is truly complexifiable in real life, but in our schools? We’ve simplified it. We have class periods, assignment schedules, and regularly scheduled report cards. We have terms.

Our schools run almost entirely on the on/ahead/behind family. On grade level. Ahead of the curve. Behind his peers. We’ve built an institution whose native grammar ranks people in historical time and then we argue about what it all means after a time has passed when little can be done about it before the next term is upon us.

We have a word for the abstract human. We call her a student, put her in a row in a gradebook, convert her into a percentile. What we lack is a word for the human inside those eleven minutes or those two days in March.

“Learner” tries so hard, but it’s been laminated onto so many mission statements that it now means roughly nothing or worse, student in a suit and tie.

So I want to propose a word, well, I want to steal a part of a word and restructure it for our time. It’s small, it’s borrowable, it’s memorable, actually, and once you have it, you’ll start seeing what it names everywhere, including in your own reading of this paragraph.

You’ll wonder how you lived this long without it, trust me.

The word is nom. Say it with me: Nom.

Where Nom Comes From

Say phenomenon slowly and you’ll hear it: phe-NOM-enon. The word sits right in the middle like a kid hiding in plain sight in the middle row in the cafeteria during a talent show. A phenomenon, in the old Greek, is phainomenon — “that which shows itself.” A nom, then, in this definition, is the human inside the showing. Not the person before the bell or after the school year ends. The person during.

Say it again with me: Nom.

Now, a confession for the etymology police: the actual Greek root is phain-, to appear, the same root that gives us phantom, fantasy, epiphany, even emphasis. The -nom- chunk is an accident of phenomenon’s anatomy. As I understand it, it has no semantic stickiness beyond its grammatical contribution.

I’m keeping it anyway, because the accident makes nom even more valuable, a phenomenon unto itself. Every syllable is about something becoming visible. A nom is a person being visible to herself in her Umwelt.

How accidental is the accident? According to online resources, Phainomenon has three pieces: phain- (show), a little connecting vowel -o- that Greek uses as mortar, and -menon, an ending that means “that which is being shown” or “that which is showing itself.” Line them up: show + nom + that-which-is-showing-it or that which is being shown.

The ending, -menon, is tricky and it has a famous relative. Philosophers know noumenon — same ending, different root: noe-, “to think,” cousin of nous, mind. So the two words are grammatical twins. Phainomenon: that which is appearing. Noumenon: that which is being thought.

Immanuel Kant called the thing as it shows itself to our senses the phenomenon, and distinguished this from the thing-in-itself, the noumenon, something real, but something thought can only gesture toward and never touch. The nom lives entirely in the now, a reality we can visit briefly and gather our rosebuds.

Kant gives us the residual, the true thing forever sealed off in memory after the show, the thing we can and do forget. The appearing is the real thing. A nom is not a theory of a kid in a classroom, not the kid we infer from data, not the kid yesterday, not the kid projected into the future. A nom is the kid appearing in the room in the moment, to the room for the moment, and to himself in history.

Greek has a historically real, semantic root spelled nom-: nomos, meaning law, custom, the way things are apportioned. It’s the root in autonomy, economy, astronomy, taxonomy — each about rule and distribution.

Nomos is, almost word for word, what we will call a norm. Nomos is the antithesis of nom in the neologism I’m proposing. A classically trained reader might have heard “law” in my coinage before she heard “phenomenon.” Sorry about that. I’m keeping the syllable. For twenty-five centuries nom has belonged to the law; for the length of this essay and, I hope, longer, it belongs to the moment.

In French nom means name, from Latin nomen. We already use it for names taken up temporarily, for the duration of the work in phrases like nom de plume, nom de guerre. A pen name, a war name. A nom, in our sense, is a being in the moment name, a nom is born in a mom(ent), who he is inside the eleven minutes before school lets out, before she goes back to being a row in the grade book.

That character depicted in a grade book is interpretable. Norm comes from Latin norma: a carpenter’s square. An instrument for measuring. So here is the whole choice, fossilized in two syllables. Reading a grade book as a narrative, a student-character can be construed as a nom or a norm. This structural ambiguity compressed into an often arbitrary choice makes grading among the most disliked acts of teaching.

Where Norm Comes From

We bumped into nomos a moment ago, you and I, a pair of noms tangled in a text. I brought nomos in for a cameo — nomos, Greek for law, custom, the apportioning of who gets what. I said it was the antithesis of nom, and I told you it meant, almost word for word, what we’d call a norm.

Autonomy, economy, astronomy, taxonomy: each a way of grasping, of holding on, ruling and dividing. All of that is true about the meaning. But I owe you the same confession I made about nom for the etymological police, and this time it cuts the other way. I have no defense: the word norm does not actually descend from nomos, but it arrives at the same airport by a completely different road, and the road is the better story.

Say it slowly and you’ll feel the family resemblance — nom, norm, a single letter apart, n-o-_-m, the kind of pair that looks born of the same parents. They aren’t. Nom is a fragment I lifted out of a word about appearing. Norm is a whole word, freestanding and complete, and it comes from a Latin one: norma — a carpenter’s square, not a metaphor, but a tool.

A builder holds the L-shaped instrument against a board to answer a single question: is this true? Is the angle right, is the edge straight, does the thing conform? Normal, in its oldest sense, doesn’t mean “average” or “fine.” In seventeenth-century geometry it meant standing at a right angle — made according to the square.

To be normal was to be square.

To be enormous — ex + norma — was to be literally out of the square: irregular, shapeless, off the standard. Abnormal, away from it. Every word in that family is about a thing held up against a fixed edge and found true, or found out-of-true.

Invite the two families to a picnic at Starved Rock State Park and you have the whole argument in miniature. Phain-, to show: the kid appears, and you meet him. Norma, the square: the kid is held up to a standard, and you check him.

And here’s another happy accident. Norma, the etymologists admit, is a word of unknown origin, but the leading guess is that Rome borrowed it, probably through the Etruscans, from the Greek gnōmōn. And gnōmōn does not mean square. It means the one who knows.

The judge. The discerner. The indicator. It shares its root — gnō-, to know — with diagnosis, prognosis, gnostic, with knowledge itself. A norm, from its unknown ancestors, is a knowing-instrument. It does not take part in the moment. It stands outside the moment and renders a verdict on it.

Going back in time, a gnomon is also the pointer on a sundial, the upright stick whose shadow tells the hour. The same Greek word names the carpenter’s square and the timekeeper’s needle. Rank and time turn out to be one object.

The gnomon throws its shadow onto a fixed, painted dial and the nom reads off the verdict: on schedule, ahead, behind, precisely the time our schools keep, standardized test as sundial. On grade level. Ahead of the curve. Behind his peers. The norm is the shadow the standard casts onto time we delude ourselves into thinking is permanent.

The nom lives in the eternal now — the eleven minutes, the showing. The norm is read off the dial, a scant, thin shadow keeping the trains on time.

There is even a portion of night sky for it. In the 1750s a French astronomer cut a faint cluster of southern stars into a constellation and named it Norma — the Carpenter’s Square, sometimes the Level and the Square. Where nom borrows its French cousin nomen for names we wear a while and set down — nom de plume, nom de guerre, the moment-name — norm gets nailed to the firmament as an instrument: a square fixed among the stars, never moving, the permanent figure against which all nom wanderers are charted.

Our schools are built almost entirely of gnomons — squares to test the angle, styluses to throw the hour. They measure, they rank, they read the shadow off the dial, and they do all of it for the benefit of the economy. Schools have had no word for the child standing in the light before the shadow falls, the one appearing in the room, to the room, and to himself.

Now we do, and that word is nom.

Say it with me: Nom.

The square is norm. Now you have the pair, you know the difference between a nom in a classroom and a norm in a classroom.

Say it again: Nom.