Discovering Serendipity

It isn’t too often that one thinks deeply of the meaning a word is supposed to disperse. One such casual yet very coherent conversation led me into the understanding the usage of the word better.

Serendipity is the case-in-point. A noun, it stands for the act of finding something delightful/valuable when you are not looking for it.

Derived from an old Persian fairy tale titled - The Three Princes of Serendip , the word was coined by Horace Walpole on 28 January 1754 in a letter he wrote to his friend Horace Mann an Englishman then living in Florence. The letter read,

"It was once when I read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do you understand serendipity? One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for, comes under this description) was of my Lord Shaftsbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon's, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs. Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table."

Interesting snippets -

Serendip is the old Persian name for Sri Lanka.

The word 'serendipity' has been voted as one of the ten English words that were hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company. However, due to its sociological use, the word has been imported into many other languages (Portuguese serendipicidade or serendipidade; French sérendipicité or sérendipité but also heureux hasard, "fortunate chance"; Spanish serendipia; Italian serendipità; Dutch serendipiteit; German Serendipität; Swedish, Danish and Norwegian serendipitet; Romanian serendipitate).

The 2001 film Serendipity (Kate Beckinsale, John Cusak) revolves around two people who fall in love in "a series of fortunate accidents"

During the final episode of the 1973 Doctor Who serial "The Green Death", The Doctor hears the dying Professor Cliff Jones utter the word "Serendipity", which leads The Doctor to replicate Cliff's tests and discover that the maggots can be killed by an edible fungus.