SECOND NATURE, expr. I was listening to a song of this title recently and it occurred to me that I didn’t really know what this phrase meant. Sure, sure, something that “is/comes as/feels like second nature” is instinctive or effortless, but shouldn’t that be first nature? What’s the difference between “it’s my nature to look up every passing thought in the OED” and “looking up every passing thought in the OED is second nature to me”?
Well, according to the dictionary in question, there is no difference. This is because the “second” in second nature isn’t about numbers. Another meaning of “second” is “following.” It’s related to Latin sequī (follow); think English “sequence,” or Spanish “seguir.” Something that is second nature—secundum naturam, if you want to get Latin about it—is following nature, or “according to nature.”
The OED doesn’t have much to add, but just in case you, like me, are not up on your Augustine et al, the Online Etymology Dictionary further explains that “according to nature” is in contrast to things that are contra naturam, against nature (bedazzled tortoises, for example), or supra naturam, beyond nature, like miracles. Second nature, as it turns out, is just regular nature.
“Second,” by the way, is not natural—as in native—to English. It’s an invasive Romance species; Old English had no such word. That’s why it doesn’t look anything like the word “two.” According to the OED, Old English speakers used “other” (óðer). This isn’t as clear as “second,” so English speakers eagerly adopted that from French.
Modern French uses the ordinal “deuxième” for almost all purposes, and the word “second” is rarer and fancier. French “second” is particularly employed for sequences in which there are only two things to count. For instance, people refer to the “Empire” (Napoléon, 1804-1815, sometimes called “le Premier Empire,” the first empire) and the “Second Empire” (Napoléon III, 1852-1870). This usage implies that there will not be a third empire. When speaking French, whether you refer to the war from 1939-1945 as the “Deuxième” or the “Seconde” World War is up to you! For what it’s worth, I think I’ve encountered “Deuxième Guerre mondiale” more often, but “deuxième” is the more common word. I can’t rule out pessimism as the driving force behind that usage, though. Google Ngrams has “seconde” as slightly more common, and French Wikipédia’s siding with the optimists on this one.
Back to English for one last note: According to Wiktionary, “[second] displaced native ‘twoth,’” as in two and presumably pronounced like tooth. As far as I can tell, that’s false. The OED has no entry for “twoth” and my Google results are sparse. My best guess is that “twoth” is a joke that enough people have made, like “it’s the twenty-twoth of August,” that it got its own Wiktionary entry. I’m trusting the OED on this one—it’s second nature to me.
And for the other, second part of this newsletter, here’s what I’ve read lately in small-r romance:
Ana María and The Fox (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Liana De la Rosa. This romance is set at such a fascinating, complex historical moment: in the 1860s, the United States is embroiled in civil war and unable to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. policy opposing further colonialism in the Western Hemisphere by European powers. France, under the rule of Napoléon III (the Second Empire, see above!), seizes the opportunity to invade Mexico in 1862. Mexico’s president, Benito Juárez, is displaced from the capital along with the rest of his government. And—stepping from history into fiction—Ana María, daughter of a powerful Mexican politician in the Juárez government, is exiled to London with her two sisters and her family fortune for safekeeping. There she meets Gideon Fox, a Member of Parliament working hard to gather support for abolishing the slave trade. Gideon is driven by his love for his grandmother, a formerly enslaved woman, and he is solely devoted to his cause. He has no time for love or anything that might result in gossip. In order to succeed, his reputation must be immaculate. This demand for perfection is familiar to Ana María, eldest daughter of a politician, but she makes a few cultural missteps when she arrives in London, like “visibly enjoying herself at a party,” that damage her reputation. She and Gideon are kept apart by the stringent demands of their social positions, but they pine for each other from afar. There is some real A+ yearning in this, plus a few great historical romance tropes inflected by the particular global politics of the moment: they both have to go to this terrible country house party because Ana María and her sisters are in political danger and need to leave London, and Gideon needs to drum up support for his bill. He rescues her from a horse ride gone wrong! She gets in trouble with the party host and requires a marriage of convenience—to Gideon! For a book with such a serious, nuanced historical background, it’s really a ton of fun. And new measure of swoonworthy hero behavior: Gideon learns to pronounce all the new words he learns from Ana María. She mentions the volcano Popocatépetl? Her father is Purépecha? None of this “that’s hard to say” whining. Gideon is on it. One word, no matter how many syllables, is nothing to him. He’ll learn a whole language for her—and he does.
I’ll be back in your inbox in late August or early September, friends!