Transcript:

There are sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour. Who thought that up?

Well back in Roman times they had a word for something very small. This word still survives in English. You know that something minute is teeny-weeny. So a small span of time gained the name minute. But back then accurate clocks were nonexistent and even an hour wasn’t measured with too much precision. The word minute had made it into Old English as a unit of time, but they were ahead of their time in that they operated on metric time and an Old English minute was usually a tenth of an hour, not a sixtieth. It was the Norman invasion and the arrival of the French minute that redefined the English minute down to one sixtieth of an hour.

The idea for this stretches back beyond the Romans or the Greeks to the Babylonians who used a division of sixty for astronomical purposes. This idea still turns up in mathematics. You know that a circle has 360 degrees and you may also know that each degree is divided up into sixty minutes. Same historical reason.

When someone calls me away from whatever I’m doing, I answer “just a minute” and the sense is the same as that original connotation of minute; by minute I mean “just a small unit of time” not “just precisely 60 seconds.”

And finally I’m getting around to our word of the day, second. Again, I turn to Old English. While Old English speakers were ahead of their time in using a metric hour with only ten minutes in it, they were a little slow on the uptake when it came to counting-off. Whereas we say first, second, third, etc. In Old English there was no word for the thing that came after first. So in an Old English baseball game there would have been no second base, it might have instead been called “other base.” This might be okay in a game with only two bases, but as you can see it quickly got ambiguous. So for people trying to make sense of whose on first and whose on “other,” the Norman Invasion came as something of a relief because now, with French came the word second (also from Latin) so placing the “other baseman” unambiguously as the second baseman.

You know I’m kidding about the baseball references but I’m not kidding about the fact that Old English had no word to describe the next thing after first. So that’s why the word second was instantly useful.

Back in Latin secundus didn’t originally mean “that which came after first”, but had a looser meaning of “following.” You can still get this sense in second’s related word sequential.

When someone calls me away from whatever I’m doing I might also answer “just a second” and in this I really mean “just a minute.” But the reason that the smaller unit of time is called a second is that just like a minute, or I should say a minute, a second is a teeny-weeny length of time. You can calculate the length of a second by taking an hour and dividing it by sixty, like those Babylonians did, and then dividing it by sixty a second time. So that you have a “second minute” unit of time. And in fact, before a second was just called a second it had been called in Latin secunda minuta for just this reason, it was an hour divided by 60 a second time.