Normate Vs. Normal

I had a professor in college that would not allow any of her students say/use the word "normal." Her reasoning was that nothing is normal especially in the field of special education. Students with disabilities are typically not viewed as normal which would make them abnormal and this fact is unacceptable.

We were however allowed to use the word "normate." //I am not entirely sure if this is a word...Webster does not recognize the word normate//

Whenever one of her students slipped and said "normal" she would lean forward and say "what did you say? I did not hear you." the slipper would then have to replace "normal" with "normate" to fix their mistake. This became somewhat amusing as we spent more and more time with this professor. We started to keep tally how many times we used the non-existing word "normate."

I was once docked points in a paper because I used the word normal instead of normate; a mistake I would only make once!

To this day whenever someone uses the word normal I secretly correct them by saying normate

because normal is not a word!