Those among you who pay attention may have wondered about the meaning of “serendipity“. You shall soon wonder no more – here is an extract from the Journal of Investigative Dermatology explaining salient elements of the etymology of the term “Serendipity” :

The “Tale of the Three Princes of Serendip” is [a] literary framework of ancient Indo-Persian origin. [..] Renaissance brought this collection of Oriental legends of travels, riddles, sagacity in solving them, to the European stage. The Tramezzini of Venice, brother-editors, used a fictional author to offer it to the public in 1557. Horace Walpole (1717–1797), son of the famous British prime minister, sitting in his estate in Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, Middlesex, translated the sagacity of the three princes into a concept which he labeled “serendipity” in a letter to Horace Mann, British envoy at the Florentine Court, dated January 28, 1754. Literally, he wrote of the three princes: “they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of”. [..] Semantically, the referral points to the island of Sri Lanka (Ceylon of yesteryear). Serendipity (Serendip) is the historical Arabo-Persian- form of Sri Lanka, a word with Sanskrit (Pali) origin, naming the island of Singhalese Serendipity (Sinhala dvipa) and kept alive in folk tales and legends of this area.

How that relates with Investigative Dermatology is anybody’s guess but I would bet that the author has made a lame attempt at making it topical by putting it on account of serendipity. Anyway…

“The Three Princes of Serendip” by Richard Boyle explains the story in more details and the dissertation continues in “Serendipity: How the Vogue word became Vague“.

Now that I have delivered those extensive explanations, my problem now is that the term is no longer obscure enough to be fit for a trendy title… But maybe I’m old enough to stop caring about that…