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• serendipity •

Pronunciation: se-rên-dip-ê-ti • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun, mass

Meaning: 1. The act of making a fortunate discovery by capricious or quixotic accidence. 2. The discovery of one thing while looking for another.

Notes: Serendipitous is the adjective; serendipitously, the adverb. A person given to serendipitous discovery is a serendipitist, if you want to push the derivations that far. Serendipity is a word that is a bit ironic and often slightly misused. For a discovery to be serendipitous, you must not be looking for the object of the discovery in any way; in fact, you might even be looking for something else.

In Play: It is not serendipitous that the cookbook you ordered arrives the day of the big dinner to which you invited your boss. This is just good luck. However, if you spoil the sauce for you cutlets and your boss's wife turns out to be a gourmet chef at a French restaurant who would just love to help out, you are then dipping into the serendipity. Has this ever happened to you: "What serendipity! I was looking to my car keys and stumbled across a pair of glasses I lost last year."

Word History: Today's Good Word comes from a fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip by the 18th-century British author, Horace Walpole. The three princes were always making fortuitous discoveries of things they were not looking for. (Serendip was the former name of Sri Lanka.) (If it wasn't serendipity it was certainly our great good fortune that Vicenzo suggested today's quirky little bit of lexical caprice.)

fortuitous

Serendipity is a nice word. But how fortuitous to find one of my favorites in the definition!

I was once checked by my professor for writing, "lucky children are raised to speak more than one native language." When I changed lucky to serendipitous, the whole thesis was accepted without further corrections.

As a matter of fact, I find the first version better than the second «corrected» one (even though I should in both cases prefer the adjective in a predicative, rather than an attributive position in the sentence). To my mind, there exists a subtle distinction between luck and good fortune on the one hand, and serendipity on the other. The latter, it seems to me, implies some sort of action on the part of the party concerned, while the former does not. Thus I shouldn't call the children in this case serendipitous, as they hadn't stumbled on something good while looking for something else. They were instead lucky (fortunate) that their parents (caretakers) had placed them in a bi- or multi-lingual environment ; the rest came, so to speak, naturally, and didn't require any particular efforts on their part. One can be lucky without being serendipitous, if one ignores the opportunities that Fortuna throws in one's way, but one can't be serendipitous without being lucky. Flam, for example, was lucky (?) in that he encountered a professor so enamoured of infrequent locutions that he (the professor) would change the grade on an essay when one single word was replaced (Flam is here in a passive position), but he became serendipitous only when he seized the opportunity, changed the word, and got a passing grade (i e, swung into action)....

Henri

While one does hesitate to quibble with a Grand Panjandrum, I must admit to feeling a tad uncomfortable with having a person be serendipitous.

To quote from the previous post:

"Flam, for example, was lucky (?) in that he encountered a professor so enamoured of infrequent locutions that he (the professor) would change the grade on an essay when one single word was replaced (Flam is here in a passive position), but he became serendipitous only when he seized the opportunity, changed the word, and got a passing grade (i e, swung into action)...."

I disagree here. Flam's seizing the opportunity and changing the word make this a planned actioin. To use serendipitous the way I think it should be used, consider this:

"Flam, for example, was lucky in that he encountered a professor so enamoured of infrequent locutions that he, Flam, learned a new phrase that got him a passing grade in another class."

Here the serendipity is the learning of the phrase. As you see, serendipity thus also refers to the accident of learning the new phrase, not the stupident (sic) himself.

Slava

Slava, Flam is a Native Japanese, and while his English is excellent, it may not be perfect, although much more perfect than mine and I'm a native English speaker.

mark the-pill Bailey

I meant no disrespect to Flaminius, in fact only now do I realize that Flam is a shortening of this board name. My quibble is with calling anyone "serendipitous." People experience serendipitous events, but the people themselves are not serendipitous.

How do you and the other members here feel about the use of serendipitous? Can a person be such, or is it an event which is such, for a person? That is my query.

Regards,

Slava

I would agree with you, Slava. I, too, wouldn't call anyone serendipitous. As the Good Doctor's definitions say, it is either an act or a discovery. While your discovery may be a person, I believe the word applies to that act of discovery rather than what was discovered.
But, my native English skills are much less than perfect as well.