Serendipity
One of my favourite words in the English language, is the word of the week at answers.com
Named for the lush island of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon; known in Arabic as Serendib), serendipity comes to us in a circuitous, fortuitous - indeed, serendipitous - fashion. Horace Walpole, the prolific and talented letter-writer, can be credited with the actual coinage of the word. He used it in correspondence dated January 28, 1754, to Horace Mann (not the American educator after whom schools have been named), alluding to its genesis in a story published in Venice in 1557 called "The Three Princes of Serendip" (which Walpole refers to disparagingly as "a silly fairy tale").
The eponymous young men, Walpole writes, "were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of"; he goes on to stress that "no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description."
Ink has been spilled on the question of what exactly constitutes a serendipitous discovery, and whether the adventures of these literary Serendipans actually fit the definition offered by Walpole. Moreover, the meaning has of late expanded to include fortunate coincidences and the like.
What is clear, though, is that two elements must be in harmony, (a) luck and (b) some sort of effort expended on the seeking. To illustrate: winning the lottery is not serendipity. The discovery of Silly Putty, say, or penicillin, was, since in each case scientists were in the lab looking for something else but had the intelligence and skill to understand the value of what they found. Similarly with the discovery of America: Christopher Columbus was out exploring, though certainly not seeking the New World.
And speaking of Exploring (or Navigating), serendipity was given a modern context last week when Sir Tim Berners-Lee pithily captured the essence of browsing the web. "You get this tremendous serendipity, where I can search the internet and come across a site that I did not set out to look for," said the inventor of the world wide web, defending the policy of net neutrality at the WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh.
Named for the lush island of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon; known in Arabic as Serendib), serendipity comes to us in a circuitous, fortuitous - indeed, serendipitous - fashion. Horace Walpole, the prolific and talented letter-writer, can be credited with the actual coinage of the word. He used it in correspondence dated January 28, 1754, to Horace Mann (not the American educator after whom schools have been named), alluding to its genesis in a story published in Venice in 1557 called "The Three Princes of Serendip" (which Walpole refers to disparagingly as "a silly fairy tale").
The eponymous young men, Walpole writes, "were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of"; he goes on to stress that "no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description."
Ink has been spilled on the question of what exactly constitutes a serendipitous discovery, and whether the adventures of these literary Serendipans actually fit the definition offered by Walpole. Moreover, the meaning has of late expanded to include fortunate coincidences and the like.
What is clear, though, is that two elements must be in harmony, (a) luck and (b) some sort of effort expended on the seeking. To illustrate: winning the lottery is not serendipity. The discovery of Silly Putty, say, or penicillin, was, since in each case scientists were in the lab looking for something else but had the intelligence and skill to understand the value of what they found. Similarly with the discovery of America: Christopher Columbus was out exploring, though certainly not seeking the New World.
And speaking of Exploring (or Navigating), serendipity was given a modern context last week when Sir Tim Berners-Lee pithily captured the essence of browsing the web. "You get this tremendous serendipity, where I can search the internet and come across a site that I did not set out to look for," said the inventor of the world wide web, defending the policy of net neutrality at the WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh.