The Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage - Noel's ESL ...

normalcy or normality
There was nothing to applaud in the play nor to commend in the review.
(the negative in nothing is confined to its own clause, so nor is needed to restate
the negative for the second clause)
However even in the second and third sentences, you may feel that or would do,
and that nor is just a stylistic device to draw attention to what follows. In fact the
negative carries over into any clause or phrase with which it is coordinated, and has
considerable “scope”. (See further under negatives.)
For the use of nor after neither, see under neither.
normalcy or normality Both these make their first appearance in the midnineteenth
century, though normality seems to have quickly become more
common and to have developed more applications. In terms of word structure
it’s more regular, there being many similar nouns ending in -ity made out of
adjectives ending in l, whereas there are none like normalcy. (The nearest analogue
is colonelcy based on a noun ending in l.) On both counts then normalcy is an
unusual word, and perhaps that was why President Harding used it in a famous
speech of 1920. Unfortunately his use of it drew censorious comment from across
the Atlantic, which still echoes in the Chambers dictionary note that it is an “illformed
word”. But the Oxford Dictionary (1989) has citations both before and after
Harding, from British and American authors. Webster’s Dictionary (1986) and the
Macquarie Dictionary (2005) both enter it without any cautionary usage note. In
Australian internet documents (Google 2006), the ratio of normalcy to normality is
about 1:4.
north, northern and northerly For Australians, both north and northern
refer to a location nearer the Equator—whether it is the north side of Sydney
Harbour, the northern beaches, or north(ern) Queensland. Before it existed as a state
in its own right, Queensland was sometimes referred to as the “northern squatting
district of New South Wales”. The northern face of a house is its sunniest aspect, just
as the south-facing side is for the British or North Americans. Northerly can also
be used to express the idea of “facing north or directed towards the north”. Note
however that when northerly is combined with wind (or breeze, gale, airstream
etc.), it means “from the north”.
When capitalised, the North in Australia can to refer to the broad band of thinly
populated country in northern Western Australia, Northern Territory and northern
Queensland—the relatively untouched deserts and scrub plains and tropical forests
which are the antithesis of urban Australia. Apart from its wilderness associations,
the term North or rather Deep North (modeled on the American Deep South) has
occasionally been used with social connotations, especially by the Bulletin in the
1970s and 80s, to refer to the more conservative aspects of Queensland culture.
Further afield, the phrase “Near North” has occasionally been used by
Australians to refer to the Far East (see under east). In broader political and
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