I was reviewing some information in Emmanual Le Roy Ladurie’s magnificent book Times of Feast, Times of Famine. It is one of the first environmental history books to use very local records from one small part of a country to show how larger climate patterns appear and shift. Ladurie was part of what is called the Annals School of French historians who sent out and “drilled down” into all the available records for one department or parish to see what they could find. Ladurie found a way to track the weather, and thus climate patterns, by the grape harvest and grain tithes.
The first time I read the book, the words threw me out of the narrative. “Secular but not cyclical?” What the huh? Worldly but not on a set schedule? That made NO sense to me. Well, it turns out that a word had to be found to describe something that recurs, but not on a predictable basis. The sequence of weather, or climate shifts, or geologic events happens over and over, but not on a predictable cycle. So the term “secular” was adopted, and is used in environmental history to describe that sort of thing. It might appear in other disciplines, but environmental history is where I generally find it.
That led me to thinking about the problem of words-for-things. Some are just amusing, like pronghorn antelope which are not real antelope. But they look a bit like some African antelope, so they are antelope (or just pronghorns* around here.) In other cases, such as theology, entire suites of words were adapted or created to describe concepts that no one had tried to articulate before. Some early church fathers were rather prolific in coining words or adapting words to fit ideas, including Tertullian. I’ve seen him credited with over 200 Latin theological words, sometimes indirect translations of the Greek (which didn’t always clarify matters, because of nuances in meaning**.) I’m not certain he should get that much credit, but he is one of the first to articulate certain concepts, like the Trinity, in ways that didn’t depend on Greek or pure analogy.
English just borrows, most of the time. Sometimes it coins words. Sometimes words get mashed into service even though they make a few of us cry into our morning tea.*** Although English is the most famous (infamous) for this, it has a long tradition in other languages. Or a language comes into being that is all new words and mashed up borrowings, like English or the Caribbean Pidgin languages.
Speech be weird.
*Or “speed deer.”
**Some things didn’t translate well. I can tell you are shocked by this.
***That peeve has been petted enough recently, so I will let it go play outside.
Cat Rotator's Quarterly 
English doesn’t just borrow words it chases other languages down alleys and steals them.
Better “speed deer” than “angry deer” (oryx – another reason for open season on the Bright Idea Fairy).
Makes you wonder if simply noting the events recur was sufficient, without creating another epicycle.
Speed goats… Snerk… And English drags other languages into dark alleys, mugs them for words, then strolls away like nothing happened!
Thank you! I knew I didn’t have the whole quote.
The word “secular” is also used in astronomy. I first saw it in celestial mechanics, referring to long-term, non-periodic changes in the orbits of planets or similar objects. It took some getting used to.
IIRC, the whole quote goes something like this: “The problem with arguments about the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a crib-house whore. English doesn’t just steal from other languages; on occasion it has been known to follow other languages into dark alleys, knock them cold, then rifle through their pockets for loose vocabulary.”
‘S truth, too.