A most pleasant day to you today, my word worms! Welcome to another joyous episode of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents. Now to examine today’s word, we need to first get something out of the way. ‘Serendipity’ is the seminal classic 2001 film starring Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack, which follows the romance between a New Yorker and a British woman as they let fate determine if they are meant to be together. Years later, they hope that destiny reunites them. Today, however, we are not talking about that ‘Serendipity’, dear listener, but I can confirm for you, that today’s word is: serendipity.

‘Serendipity’ is a word meaning ‘the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way’. The first recorded use in the English language comes from Horace Walpole in 1754, who wrote to his friend, also named Horace, go figure, to explain an unexpected discovery he made about a lost painting by Giorgio Vasari that references a Persian fairy tale, ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’. According to Walpole, the prices were ‘always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.’ ‘Serendip’ is an old name for Sri Lanka, also known as ‘Sarandib’ by Arab traders. It’s derived from the Sanskrit ‘Siṃhaladvīpaḥ’.

One might also refer to a serendipitous invention; that is, one that is caused by chance rather than intent. Examples of serendipitous inventions include the Post-It, silly putty, velcro, and the popsicle. Now I ask you, how could we ever survive a piping hot summer without the popsicle? Thank goodness for serendipity! 

Serendipity’s antonym is ‘zemblanity’, which means’ making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries occurring by design’, or, put simply, ‘an unpleasant surprise’.  William Boyd coined this term in the late twentieth century, deriving the term from Novaya Zemlya a cold, barren land with many features opposite to the lush Sri Lanka that serendipity takes its name from.

Isn’t language wonderful?

Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber

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