SerendipityMay 26, 2007 7:52 pm
I found this in a book I read a few weeks ago ( The Professsor and the Madman by Simon Winchester):
" Ceylon, the lushly overgrown tropical island that seems to hang from India’s southern tip like a teardrop….These days it is called Sri Lanka; once the Arab sea traders called it Serendib, and in the eighteenth century Horace Walpole created a fanciful story about three princes who reigned there, and who had the enchanting habit of stumbling across wonderful things quite by chance. Thus was the English language enriched by the word serendipity, without its inventor, who never traveled to the East, ever really knowing why. "
( Pages 43, 44)
Definition of Serendipity: "the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for" ( Webster Dictionary)
Stumbling by chance across the etymology of serendipity was itself a … serendipity !
