Ordinary

Ordinary (pronounced awr-din-rhe (U) or awr-dn-er-ee (non-U))

(1) Of no special quality or interest; commonplace; unexceptional.

(2) Plain or undistinguished.

(3) Somewhat inferior or below average; mediocre (often when describing sporting competitions or in other contexts where expectations of exceptional performance are high).

(4) Customary; usual; normal; the usual course of things; normal condition or health; a standard way of behavior or action (use now most prevalent in Ireland & Scotland).

(5) In slang (mostly US, south of the Mason-Dixon Line), common, vulgar, or disreputable.

(6) In the definition of jurisdictional limits, immediate, as contrasted with something that is delegated.

(7) In some places, of officials of the agencies of the state, belonging to the regular staff or the fully recognized class.

(8) In ecclesiastical use, an order or form for divine service, especially that used for Mass (the prescribed form of divine service, ie those parts of the Mass that do not vary from day to day and (by extension) in secular use, a book of rules or other document setting out ordinary or regular conduct.

(9) In the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church, the service of the Mass exclusive of the canon.

(10) A member of the clergy appointed to prepare condemned prisoners for death, the use derived from the role of the chaplain of Newgate prison who prepared prisoners for the gallows (obsolete).

(11) In English ecclesiastical law, a bishop, archbishop, or other ecclesiastic (or their deputy or other nominee), in their capacity as an ex officio ecclesiastical authority (typically, a bishop holding an office to which certain jurisdictional powers are attached).

(12) In some US states, a judge of a court of probate.

(13) In a restaurant or inn, a complete meal in which all courses are included at one fixed price per head (as opposed to à la carte service) (both UK use, now rare).

(14) An arrangement whereby an individual hosts others to a meal in a restaurant, latter billing the guests a pre-agreed amount.

(15) A late-nineteenth century term for the penny-farthing bicycle (distinguishing them from the newer “safety bicycles”), still used (along with "hi-wheel" and variants) by hobbyists.

(16) In heraldry, any of the simplest and commonest charges (the “conventional”), such as the bend, fesse & cross, usually in geometric form with straight or broadly curved edges and commonly charged upon shields

(17) In mathematics, (of a differential equation) containing two variables only and derivatives of one of the variables with respect to the other

(18) As All Ordinaries (“all ords” in the market vernacular) index, a share index calculated using the last traded price of 500 of the largest publically listed companies on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX).

(19) A courier; someone delivering mail or post (used between the sixteenth & nineteenth centuries by those in the service of the Royal Mail).

1250–1300: From the Middle English noun & adjective ordinarie (regular, customary, belonging to the usual order or course, conformed to a regulated sequence or arrangement), from the Anglo-Norman ordenarie, ordenaire et al, from the Medieval Latin, noun use of the Classical Latin ordinārius (orderly, regular, of the usual order), the construct being ordin- (stem of ordō (row, rank, series, regular arrangement) (genitive ordinis) + -ārius (the adjectival suffix).  The alternative spelling ordinarie is long obsolete.  Ordinary is a noun & adjective, ordinariness is a noun, ordinarily, extraordinarily & superextraordinarily are adverb and extraordinary (also as extra-ordinary) is an adjective; the noun plural is ordinaries.

In English, the adjective was derived from the noun in the sixteenth century in the sense of “common in occurrence, not distinguished in any way” and this endured in English, the O-Level (once the lowest of the three levels of the General Certificate of Education in the UK secondary school system (dating from 1947 as a contraction of “ordinary level”) remaining available in some overseas systems).  Generally though, the various noun uses adopted between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries faded for use except in the phrase “out of the ordinary” (someone of something beyond that regularly encountered, expected or customary) although in fields as diverse as steel fabrication and financial market trading, there were such uses from the mid-twentieth century.  The adjective ornery was a dialectal contraction of ordinary (which most sources list as class-based rather than a regionalism) in US English and first documented in 1816 (the history in oral use unknown).  It was used to convey the sense of “poor quality, coarse, ugly” and by the 1860s the meaning ad evolved to the more specific “mean, cantankerous and bad-tempered (orneriness the noun).  That coining hints at the strange history of the word which, following the practice in Latin, began as something neutral meaning “normal, in the expected place, of the expected appearance etc” yet came to be used (as a comparative) also in the negative (somewhat inferior, below average, plain & unexceptional (even rather mediocre).  By contrast, the extra- in extraordinary is used not as an intensifier but to create an antonym; something extraordinary is that which is exceptionally good.  Politicians are most inclined to speak of us as “ordinary people” which presumably implies that even if only sub-consciously, they think of themselves (and others in the political class) as extraordinary and the rest of us as ordinary indeed.

Lord Dawson of Penn (1864–1945; Physician-in-ordinary to the King, 1910-1937).

So calling something ordinary can mean either it’s commonplace (nothing special or unusual) and thus entirely average or its’ below average or of poor quality.  An “ordinary day” might be one pleasingly free of problems or one which has disappointed because nothing especially good happened.  To say someone is ordinary can be a compliment if one is distinguishing them from the surrounding madmen, nutcases and psychos and is essentially the same as calling them “normal” yet it can also mean “dull” or “not that attractive” and just as the politicians know we’re ordinary and they’re not, in the social media age “celebrities” and “ordinary people” really are two separate populations; ‘twas ever thus of course but now it’s an industry.  In ecclesiastical and secular law the old technical meaning persisted.  The title of physician in ordinary to the King (or Queen) is no longer in use but it meant simply the sovereign’s personal doctor and additional doctors who might be summoned were styled either physicians extraordinary or extra physicians.  They needed to be multi-skilled, at least one documented as having euthanized a dying king to ensure the death could be announced in the respectable morning broadsheets rather than the disreputable afternoon tabloids.  Interestingly, years later, Lord Dawson would speak in the House of Lords against the idea of euthanasia being provided for in legislation, maintaining that it was something best left to the judgment of the doctor in the room which will for some confirm the wisdom of Evelyn Waugh’s (1903-1966) observation that the greatest risk to one is hospital is “being murdered by the doctors”.  Although physicians-in-ordinary are no longer described as such, in the Medical Household (attached to the Royal Household in England), the positions of Apothecaries to the King & Occultist to the King have never been disestablished.

In canon law, the term is used still to describe someone having immediate jurisdiction in a given case of ecclesiastical law (typically a bishop within a diocese).  That use dates from the fourteenth century and was picked up in the 1800s in secular judicial administration to refer to a judge vested with the right to handle cases on the basis of ex-officio authority, rather than by delegation.  In other words, that authority was the ordinary, normal authority held by a judge within their jurisdictional competence.  In the UK, the best-known use was in the title Lords of Appeal in Ordinary (the Law Lords in casual use).  These were the judges appointed under the Appellate Jurisdiction Act (1876) to exercise the judicial functions of the House of Lords which was the highest appellate for most cases decided by the UK’s lower courts (apart from a handful of institutions from which cases on appeal proceeded to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council).  Because the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary were technically appointed as barons in the peerage of England, they thus had the right to sit in the Lords and vote on legislation and this meant ultimately they might be called to decide upon cases dealing with the very laws they’d been part of creating.  In practice this was rarely controversial but it came to bother academic political scientists and other theorists who noted the importance of the doctrine of the separation of powers in a democratic system.  What made it worse (at least on paper) was that Lord Chancellor (1) sat in and presided over the House of Lords, (2) was ex officio, a judge in the Court of Appeal and the president of the Chancery Division (an inheritance from the days prior to the Judicature Acts (1876) when the Lord Chancellor headed the old Court of Chancery) and (3) was a member of cabinet.  The office therefore straddled the executive, legislative and judicial functions of government so the fingers were uniquely were in three pies.  It was something which had been discussed for decades before the New Labour government, anxious to do things which would please the various European Union (EU) critics, reformed the arrangements, taking advantage of the prevailing mood to axe from the Lords as many of the hereditary peers as could be managed.  In 2009, New Labour created the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom and the House of Lords ceased to be vested with judicial functions, the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary then in office concurrently appointed as Supreme Court judges and excluded from the Lords until their retirement from the bench.

Lindsay Lohan at the Dorchester Hotel restaurant China Tang, London, June 2017.

Sibyl, Lady Colefax (1874–1950) was an English socialite and interior decorator who in the 1930s & 1940s followed the tradition of hosting “Ordinaries” at London’s Dorchester Hotel, small lunch parties with a set menu, after which she would invoice the guests for their meal.  In the restaurant trade, an “ordinary” was a lunch or dinner in which all courses were included at the one fixed price per head (as opposed to à la carte service).  Because Lady Colefax essentially “bought in bulk” and the menu was what would now be understood as a “chef’s choice”, the prices were good and her address book was the envy of London society so the company was always amusing and occasionally illustrious.  In his infamously indiscrete diaries, Henry "Chips" Channon (1897–1958) would sometimes refer to her as “Old Coalbox” but most of the entries about her were affectionate and sympathetic.