Serendipity

I just finished reading the excellent book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs, whose blog I’ve been following for years, and he’s talking about the importance of serendipity in reading for pleasure, and he drops this:

The word was coined by that curious man Sir Horace Walpole, known today (if at all) as one of the founders of the “Gothic” tale of suspense and terror^[1], but more famous in his own time as an especially elegant and proficient writer of letters. In a 1754 letter to a friend he describes his discovery of some curious Venetian coat of arms and pauses to say that “this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity.” And then he explains this “very expressive word” of his own invention: “I once read a silly fairy tale, called ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’” – Serendip being an old name for Sri Lanka: “as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of … (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description).” The finding of what one is not looking for will be the element of the letter most obviously relevant to what I’ve been saying so far; but equally important is the phrase “by accidents and sagacity,” or, as Walpole puts it later in the same letter, “accidental sagacity.”

“Serendip being an old name for Sri Lanka.” Fucking what?

I’d always assumed the word was of Latin origin. So I looked this up, and sure enough:

The name comes from Serendip, an old Persian name for Sri Lanka (Ceylon), hence Sarandib by Arab traders. It is derived from the Sanskrit Siṃhaladvīpaḥ (Siṃhalaḥ, Sinhalese + dvīpaḥ, island), meaning Isle of the Sinhalas.

Sanskrit. It’s from Sanskrit. And the story itself is adapted from Persian stories rather than anything actually to do with Sri Lanka.

Like my friend Divij commented when I sent this to him, “Is all language just some random white dude in the 1700s making stuff up?”