A Return to Normaldom
The radio said something about normality. Mel, who was sitting in the car with me, said: "Why is it normality, not normalcy?" Well, yes, it is normality—but it's also normalcy.
Normality is the older word, and the word that English speakers outside the US prefer. Some people consider normalcy an ugly and unnecessary neologism. Those people must be extremely old: normalcy made its debut around 1857, less than 25 years after normality entered the language in 1833.
It was Warren G. Harding, arguably not the best President ever to serve the United States, who popularized normalcy. In a campaign speech, he promised a "return to normalcy," by which he meant a return to a pre-Great-War lifestyle. Before Harding's use of the word, normalcy was used mainly in mathematics, to refer to lines that meet at a right angle.
Nouns that end in -cy usually come from adjectives ending in -t, such as complacent, hesitant, or pregnant. Maybe we should invent the words complacenality, hesitality, and pregnality out of fairness.
Normality doesn't always mean the same thing as normalcy. In medical terms, the words abnormality and normality are a pair. One wouldn't talk about finding a normalcy, but a normality. But both words come from the Latin word norma, meaning carpenter's square. Normal means both standard and square, just as right does (see Right, Right). Normaldom and normalness, while rare, are real words which mean the same thing.
A final note: the word abnormalcy isn't quite here yet, but watch for it as it comes.
This one could be useful. If you refer to a woman's pregnancy, you often mean the growth, progress, and health of the embryo itself, or related biological factors. Pregnality could mean talking about other things related to being pregnant. It's her pregnancy that leads to a child being born, but her pregnality might make it harder to tie her shoes.