I’m gonna go hard for a second here and say that they most certainly do not look “really silly”.
Your echoing a term unique to a single author and acting unimpressed when someone hasn’t heard of it is weird. If you were couth, you’d have linked to the work or defined the term after using it. As it stands, your use of the term “secular cycle” is nothing more than a smarmy debate-trap.
hydrospanner@lemmy.world 10 months ago
In fairness, even this just seems like those two authors are the only ones using this term in this way, almost like they intentionally chose a word to specifically use in a way that didn’t agree with the way everyone understands it.
Further, I don’t think it’s tricky reasonable to be snotty about it when you’re choosing to use the term in this one very specific, abnormal way without explaining why.
Like…they might just as well have called their book Chocolatey Cycles. Most people wouldn’t make the connection unless they were familiar with the work, and would think that it’s a typo or other error.
Simply put, your referencing this work doesn’t make me think “Oh! They were actually right about the word!”, rather, it makes me think, “Oh…they, and the authors of that book, were all wrong about the word.”
sj_zero 10 months ago
The etymology of the word secular from latin is "of a generation". So while it is a non-standard use of the word, it can be used to refer to something that happens once in a generation or once in a large amount of time like a century.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/secular
Pipoca@lemmy.world 10 months ago
www.etymonline.com/word/secular
Generation is commonly used in the sense of a fairly short span of time, ~20 years. Secular cycle, googling quickly, seems to be using secular more in the ‘lifetime/age’ sense since the cycles are over the course of a couple centuries.