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I just want to say off the bat that I can speculate really well myself, was culturally adjacent, and am pretty good with the language. So if you don't have more or novel information on this subject than I have, you probably don't have an answer I'm looking for.

I was born in the late 1960's. That means for a lot of 1970's lingo I was wasn't really participating in the culture, but I was adjacent enough to it that I could pick it up from context. For example, I know what "groovy" meant.

However, there's one term that I've been at a loss to figure out the meaning of for the last 50 years: "natural". I know what it means today (basically the opposite of "artificial"). However, its pretty clear there was a different meaning, used in a different context, in the early 1970's. I'll give a couple of examples:

dancing in the moonlight
everybody's feeling warm and bright
its such a fine and natural sight
everybody's dancing in the moonlight

Sweet, sweet Connie, doin' her act
She had the whole show and that's a natural fact

I'm pretty sure there are more I've stumbled across over the years, but these are the two I easily remember.

Now I'm pretty sure this form of the word is being used as an intensifier. That probably explains why its so tough for me to suss out any further meaning from it via context. However, I don't think its a completely general intensifier.

I'm hoping someone can come in here with answers that rely on one (or more) of 3 things:

  1. More examples, that allow us to better triangulate this term's early 1970's meaning.
  2. First hand knowledge as someone who was the right age (probably between 60 and 70 now) to report how this was actually used and what was meant when it was used.
  3. Some reference to someone else doing one of the above.
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    "It ain't fiction, just a natural fact. We come together 'cause opposites attract." - Paula Abdul, Opposites Attract (1988)
    – ishtar
    Commented Aug 29 at 21:12
  • @ishtar - Dang good catch. It looks like that song was written by Oliver Leiber. If google is to be believed (diecy now that it uses AI), he's 7 years older than me, meaning he would in fact have been old enough to internalize its meaning in the early 1970's.
    – T.E.D.
    Commented Aug 29 at 21:29
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    The Google Ngram graph for "natural fact" indicates that the term has been in use for more than 250 years, and that it has grown substantially more frequent in published writing since the early 1970s, though it has still not attained the pinnacle of frequency that it reached in 1878.
    – Sven Yargs
    Commented Aug 29 at 21:40
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    I don't think it's an intensifier. It has its normal meaning of not something created by humans. But in many contexts that implies that it's better, because it's unsullied by human interference (similar to the way we think "organic" produce is better).
    – Barmar
    Commented Aug 29 at 21:52
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    You make me feel like a natural woman. Alone again naturally. Come dancing, it's only natural. I'll refrain from speculation, as instructed.
    – Stuart F
    Commented Aug 30 at 1:25

2 Answers 2

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I think it simply means simple. Natural can be used for something real or genuine; free from nonsense or pretention. OED lists this sense connected to the nature with the earliest citation from 1553 as below:

Of thought, behaviour, or expression: having the ease or simplicity of nature; free from affectation, artificiality, or constraint; simple, unaffected, easy.

1553 If proper and naturall wordes, in well ioyned sentences do lyuely expresse the matter.
R. Ascham, Report Affaires Germany 1

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “natural (adj.), sense I.10.a,” June 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1078228393.

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  • The OED entru has a few more recent citations that are more persuasive
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Aug 30 at 12:18
  • @Mari-LouA - If so I'd like to see them, as I have to confess to being less than fully persuaded by this one.
    – T.E.D.
    Commented Aug 30 at 12:59
  • @T.E.D. it's in the link. 1971 The charm and humility of his essentially natural personality. (1.10.b) Meg liked men natural, she'd claimed once, not reeking with male perfumes. 1973 (1.11.a)
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Aug 30 at 17:43
  • @Mari-LouA - That is in fact quite helpful. Unfortunately for this answer however, of the meanings listed, the one being referred to here (1.10.a if I'm reading things right) is one of the least applicable. Far better would be the meanings from 1.7-1.9, although I don't think any of them are quite there either. The (supposedly extinct) Scottish one in 1.8.a seems closest. Notice every example in there has it used as an intensifier of some kind.
    – T.E.D.
    Commented Aug 30 at 18:30
  • Now that I think about it, this wouldn't be the first time a word or term the O.E.D. claimed was extinct popped up much later in an AmE dialect, would it?
    – T.E.D.
    Commented Aug 30 at 18:55
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Dancing in the Moonlight is an example of how "natural" came to be associated with "getting back to nature". Civilization was seen as suffering from a kind of illness that only a return to nature would cure.

Compare this lyric from Joni Mitchell:

And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

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3
  • All good. And Joni's garden was Eden.
    – Yosef Baskin
    Commented Aug 30 at 12:09
  • @YosefBaskin ... as mentioned later in CSN's "Woodstock" and GnR's "Lost in the Garden of Eden"
    – T.E.D.
    Commented Aug 30 at 20:09
  • Not to mention Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"
    – Sven Yargs
    Commented Aug 30 at 21:24

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