Way Back in "68 I Learned a Word

 

1967 or 1968, that was when I first learned the word serendipity. Came upon the term when my teacher Mr. Quirk, with his mysterious eye patch and those whispered stories about his possible prior life in the CIA, assigned me to read a short story to read.  I stumbled upon the word in said story, and as I often did back then, I looked it up.  

 

Somebody just on a wild hare (hair?) had created the word. The fact that serendipity was a made-up word created for a seventeenth or early eighteenth-century novelist just amazed me.  I mean who gets to do that, just create a word to fit what they want to say?  Well, these days I guess TV sitcom writers because I really don’t think boink meant boink before Friends. But now in 2023 we all know what boink means, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

 

I digress, as I often do.  But serendipity well it was such a lovely word and delightful concept.  In the old days I would crack open my blue leather-bound pocket OED and typed out the definition and etymology of the word for you.  Today I will use first the built-in smart lookup in Microsoft Word for the definition, “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way” and a search engine for the etymology.  Per a search used the Google search engine, (I probably should have used Duck, Duck, Go), the word was created in 1754,  Serendipity was, and I quote the great God Goggle here, “… coined by Horace Walpole, suggested by The Three Princes of Serendip, the title of a fairy tale in which the heroes ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’.”

 

“Always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of,” is an apt description of my life currently. On a warm day walking about Lisbon in any direction is a form of an accident.  I am retired. Absent seeking out food I have no place I really have to go. As to making discoveries, well every single day offers me discoveries I was not in search of.  Who knew there was a store here that sold carnival masks? Who knew there was a garden center with a tree in the center of it filled with parrots?  Who knew that sipping an espresso, decaf in my case, at a kiosk in a park was as good as taking any happy drug?

 

There is no heaven here on earth.  But for a time, now and again, there are places where joyful moments come more frequently than they by any right ought to. And good morning to you all.