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Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

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.

A character in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow explains why he had used it in error in a line of poetry that he had written: ‘And passion carminative as wine’. In carminative, he explains, ‘was the idea of singing and the idea of flesh, rose-coloured and warm, with a suggestion of the jollities of mi-Carême and the masked holidays of Venice. Carminative — the warmth, the glow, the interior ripeness were all in the word.’ Then it occurred to him to look it up in a dictionary.

No doubt Boris Johnson knew about Crome Yellow, and about Swift too. But I rather suspect that, even on Literacy Day, many suggestions of favourite words are based on sub-literate prejudices. There is, of course, nothing wrong with being illiterate. Fine poetry has been composed by the illiterate, but that is not, I suspect, the focus of Literacy Day.

The word serendipity was, as we all know, coined by Horace Walpole, as he explained in a letter on 28 January 1754: ‘I once read a silly fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right — now do you understand serendipity?’

Walpole here makes the princes seem like Sherlock Holmes rather than fortunate discoverers of things they were not looking for. But is the accidental aspect of the meaning that has endured, rather than the sagacious.

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Patrick Brooks

September 29th, 2007 5:18pm

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.