Did You Know?
You don't need to be a material girl to know that we are living in a material world, but if you're lacking ways to describe our earthly existence, the adjective secular just might be your lucky star. Secular, which comes from the Latin noun saeculum (meaning, variously, "generation," "age," "century," and "world"), has been in vogue since at least the 13th century, at least when there has been a need to distinguish between the sacred and the profane. In some of its earliest uses, secular described clergy who lived "in the world" rather than in seclusion within a monastery. It wasn't that the papas didn't preach, so to speak, but that they did so in churches among the hoi polloi. From there, it took little time for people to express themselves using today's meanings, using secular to describe something related to worldly matters (as in "secular music" or "secular society") rather than something spiritual, or overtly and specifically religious, like a prayer.