Second Wind
- From: CDB <bellemarec@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 16 May 2008 06:23:27 -0700 (PDT)
Chantal Hebert, a columnist for the Toronto Star, has a good command
of English, but she sometimes gets her idioms wrong. In a column I
saw today, she wrote "When Stephen Harper came to power on the heels
of more than a decade of Liberal rule, the sense that Canada's
politics was in dire need of a second breath extended far beyond the
circle of his supporters." Pretty clearly, the phrase she wanted was
"second wind".
The jolt of seeing it wrongly put made me think about the use of
"wind" to mean "breath". Of course, there is an obvious connection,
but something about it makes me wonder if there is a nautical
connection too, the bridge being the idea of wind in your sails. In
particular, I was struck by the similarity, in both form and meaning,
between "second wind" and the Latin "ventus secundus", second, or
following, or favourable, wind.
OneLook doesn't mention the connection, my SOED3 groups the phrase
with the other uses meaning "breath", and googlng the two phrases
gives no result, but I can't believe there was no connection in the
mind of the coiner, especially if the idiom originated at the time
when Latin was part of everybody's education. My dictionary gives no
date of origin for the phrase; can somebody with OED access help?
I realise I'm cutting way down on my chances of a reply by posting
from Google, but it's the only thing I have to use right now, alas.
.
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