Mind your language

Wednesday, 19th September 2007

Walking to the station the other day I was thinking how annoying it is that, when people are invited to name their favourite words, so many answer serendipity.

Walking to the station the other day I was thinking how annoying it is that, when people are invited to name their favourite words, so many answer serendipity. Then, blow me if the next news report I read didn’t detail an invitation from Education Action, a charity, to send in favourite words to celebrate Literacy Day. (There is such a thing.) ‘The most popular so far,’ said someone involved, ‘are those associated with positive aspirations, like peace, love, and serendipity.’

Yet serendipity is in a different category from peace or love. People might like peace and love, but it’s the sound of serendipity they like. It is like Boris Johnson’s choice: carminative. This does not, as the BBC reported, mean ‘the effects of relieving flatulence’, but ‘promoting the expression of flatulence’. Jonathan Swift wrote the memorable couplet ‘Carminative and diuretic / Will damp all passion sympathetic.’

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Patrick Brooks

September 29th, 2007 5:18pm Report this comment

Sir, Just the once Dot Wordsworth’s prodigious learning has let her down over the term “serendipity” (“Mind Your Language”, 19 September). Then again, she was let down in turn by Horace Walpole. “Serendip” was the ancient Persian term for what is now Sri Lanka. Legend has it that a Persian traveler set off for somewhere else, was shipwrecked on that magical island and decided he was better off there than where he was meant to be. So, for the Persians Serendip stood for “happy, unexpected discovery”, avant la lettre, and in coining the term serendipity after hearing the “silly story of the Three Princes of Serendip” (who, naturally, made happy unexpected discoveries) Walpole not only committed cross-cultural plagiarism but also rather missed the point of the word he had just invented. In my view serendipity therefore deserves its top billing both for its mellifluous bounce and the almost onomatopoeic concept it embodies – although personally I prefer serendipitous.

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