This week’s theme
Toponyms

This week’s words
Smithfield bargain
kryptonite
Punic
byzantinize
serendipitous

---

A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(ser-uhn-DIP-i-tuhs)

MEANING:

adjective: Relating to fortunate discoveries or happenings by chance.

ETYMOLOGY:

From serendipity, coined by Horace Walpole after the fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip”. Earliest documented use: 1958.

NOTES:

The story “The Three Princes of Serendip” traveled to English from Persian via French and Italian. Serendip is an old Persian name for Sri Lanka.

Here’s an example from the story. Without having actually seen it, the princes describe a merchant’s lost camel: lame, blind in one eye, missing a tooth, carrying honey on one side and butter on the other, also carrying a pregnant woman.

How did they figure all this out?
Lame: The tracks showed only three footprints.
Blind in one eye: They noticed yellowed grass eaten on one side of the path, but the green grass on the other side was untouched.
Missing a tooth: Chewed clumps of grass had fallen from the gap in the teeth.
Carrying honey and butter: One side of the road was a trail of ants; the other side had flies.
Carrying a pregnant woman: The princes deduced this from the scent of the urine and the handprints on the ground from her lifting herself up.
Now we know where Sherlock Holmes learned his craft.

Horace Walpole described his coined word serendipity in a letter to a friend as “making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity”. Not to quibble with the word coiner, but the princes weren’t making discoveries by chance. They were using logical deduction, however farfetched.

In the current understanding of the word, the sagacity part has been largely lost.

USAGE:

“Ed Boyden, a neuroscientist at MIT who made his name as one of the people behind optogenetics, points out that innovations are often serendipitous -- from Alexander Fleming’s chance discovery of penicillin to the role of yogurt-makers in the development of CRISPR, a gene-editing technique.”
Grey Matter, Red Tape; The Economist (London, UK); Jan 6, 2018.

See more usage examples of serendipitous in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: