secret and secretive

I was startled to hear recently about a secretive military base on the Western Australian coast line.  The Chinese were being accused of spying on it.

I enjoyed the idea of the base whispering behind its hand or scuttling around in dark corners.

Secret is from the Latin secretus meaning ‘kept apart’ or ‘hidden’.  Basically it applies to things, not people.  Letters, documents, meetings, military bases — these can all be hidden.

Secretive on the other hand applies to people. The force of the -ive suffix is to give the meaning ‘inclined to secrets’. It can then also apply to things that people do to indicate this attitude — a secretive smile, a secretive glance.

In the same way I think that the adverb secretively should be limited to the way people behave that indicates their inclination to keep things to themselves.

You can smile secretively.

But you meet secretly.  Your meeting is kept hidden from others.

There seems to be considerable overlap between the two.  The Oxford English Dictionary is holding the line and denying the existence of secretively.  That is one extreme. At the other end of the scale is using secretively and secretly as interchangeable.

A friend queried this, commenting that if a military base did not reveal much of what it did to the public, could it not be described as secretive.  I pondered this but decided no.  A military base does not have the option of choosing to or being inclined to keep secrets. There would be laws of the land that govern what it does or does not reveal.  It can be restricted, classified, or top-secret. The clincher, for me, is that it cannot be top-secretive.