Learn English – Etymology of “medicine” and its Native American usage

According to etymonline.com:

gesundheit 1914, from Ger. Gesundheit, lit. "health!" Also in toast auf ihre Gesundheit "to your health" (see sound (adj.)). Lith. aciu, echoic of the sound of a sneeze, has come to mean "good luck, God bless you." See also God.

The United States has a large population of German immigrants and heritage speakers. Take that into consideration, along with the fact that a lot of Americans spent a lot of time fighting in two World Wars in Germany, and that many military personel are still stationed there.

'Secular', as mplungjan or another good dictionary will tell you, comes from the Latin saecula. There is no perfect translation for this, but 'age' , as in 'spirit of the age' is fairly close.

And that is the cause of the opposite meanings. To an economist or a journalist who is used to thinking of a decade as long enough for entire theories to rise and fall, an age is the longest period imaginable; durable ideas can be age-old and this age is synonymous with 'this world' or 'everything'. But to a theologian, who naturally contrasts 'time' with 'eternity' (hence temporal as both 'time-related' and 'not related to the church') an age is a fleeting moment. Isaac Watts wrote "A thousand ages in Thy sight/ Are as an evening gone"; the mediaeval Dies Irae has the line "Solvit saeclum in favilla", 'he dissolves the age into ashes'. Nineteenth century freethinkers, looking for a term to reflect a philosophy with no belief in eternity, reasonably chose secularism.