Serendipity -an etymology... any history of meaning is a journey

"To orientate,

 we look towards Oriental lands" 

Not by chance  my own blog is related somehow to this word, thru this book: 


The Travels 
and Adventures of Serendipity:

1- Current usage (1990-onwards)
2- Coinage In the English World.
3- The Eastern context
4- The book itself!


Entry1. Current usage (1990-onwards)
1.1. Comencem al costat de casa. Serendipity ens ha entrat a les llengües romàniques per l'anglès. Encara no hi ha una versió en francès, menys en català! A data d'avui, goglejant "Sérendipité" nomès tenim 24.000 minsos resultats, versus els 64.00 del castellà "serendipia" i el català de serendípia).


1.2. El valor semàntic al que ens volem referir el trobem a les entrades portuguesa i italiana del wikipedia:

• Serendipidade, também conhecido como Serendipismo, Serendiptismo ou ainda Serendipitia, é um neologismo que se refere às descobertas afortunadas feitas, aparentemente, por acaso.
• Il termine serendipità è un neologismo indicante la sensazione che si prova quando si scopre una cosa non cercata e imprevista mentre se ne sta cercando un'altra. Il neologismo è ormai generalmente accettato nei vocabolari della lingua italiana, magari con la specifica di "non comune":

1.3. Amb la meva experiència el primer que et trobes és desconeixement, per copiar un parell de comentaris a blogs arreu:

Serendipity??? interessant paraula. Lo primer que em ve al cap és la pel?lícula de John Cusack i Klate Beckinsale (crec que es la xica que va fer Perlharbour). Jo fins al moment de veure la peli no tenia ni idea del significat d'esta paraula, ara diria que Serendipity és algo com un accident inesperat, però fortuit.

rdeaza (IP:80.34.44.208) 08-11-2007 11:38:27 La veritat es que jo tampoc tinc molt clar el significat de la paraula....encara que no puc amagar que des de que la vaig escoltar per pirmera vegada, ha sonat en un to especial al meu cap. Crec que com diu neus te que vore en algo inesperat, crec que te que vore en descobrir algo, és més crec ha de ser algo inesperat i agradable.....Encara que no ho se. Segur que si algu llig el que hem escrit dirà, i pq no ho miren al diccionari?...També te raó. La definició exacta és: descobrir algo per casualitat o descobriment fortuit de algo molt bonic.

1.4. Coses que no entendrem:

Serendipity és un motor lliure de blog, amb una llicència de tipus BSD, en el llenguatge PHP. Serendipity comprèn un mecanisme deplugins, que permet d'enriquir-ne el contingut funcional.

1.5. En el món anglosaxó ja ha passat a la fase de contacte amb el món de la ciència i la trobem allà on mirem. Bastarà tres exemples:

• els productes comercials ( googlejant serendipity a google images ens surten 1.600.000 resultats)  
• La coneguda revista Psychology Today, del  1r  maig 2010 the  headline that says “Serendipity: Seize the Power of Chance”, accompanied by a picture of a four leaf clover. I couldn’t help but pick it up and read the article Make Your Own Luck by Rebecca Webber, which I found it to be very enlightening.

• a baix el banner del canal de la revista The Economist

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Entry2. allexperts.com web
The country now known as "Sri Lanka" used to be called "Ceylon."  Before that, it was called "Serendip."  The Arabic form is "SerendiB."

In 1754, the Englishman Horace Walpole coined the word "serendipity" in a letter he wrote.  He made up the word based on a fairy tale called "The Three Princes of Serendip."

Here is the complete etymology of the word -- with examples of its usage -- the BIBLE of the word origin field, "The Oxford English Dictionary" --

[f. Serendip, a former name for Sri Lanka + -ITY.
 A word coined by Horace Walpole, who says (Let. to Mann, 28 Jan. 1754) that he had formed it upon the title of the fairy-tale ‘The Three Princes of Serendip', the heroes of which ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of'.]

   The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. Also, the fact or an instance of such a discovery.
 Formerly rare, this word and its derivatives have had wide currency in the 20th century.

 1754 H. WALPOLE Let. to Mann 28 Jan., This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity. 1880 E. SOLLY Index Titles of Honour Pref. 5 The inquirer was at fault, and it was not till some weeks later, when by the aid of Serendipity, as Horace Walpole called itthat is, looking for one thing and finding anotherthat the explanation was accidentally found. 1926 E. MEYNELL Life of Francis Thompson xiii. 221 To the Serendipity Shopthe venture of a friend in Westbourne Grovehe would often go. 1955 Sci. Amer. Apr. 92/1 Our story has as its critical episode one of those coincidences that show how discovery often depends on chance, or rather on what has been called ‘serendipity'the chance observation falling on a receptive eye. 1971 S. E. MORISON European Discovery Amer.: Northern Voy. i. 3 Columbus and Cabot..(by the greatest serendipity of history) discovered America instead of reaching the Indies. 1980 TWA Ambassador Oct. 47/2 It becomes a glum bureaucracy, instead of the serendipity of 30 people putting out a magazine.

   Hence serendipitist.

 1939 JOYCE Finnegans Wake 191 You..semisemitic serendipitist, 

Entry 3. Costa creure però això és de un journal croata de Ciències: Dermatologie!!!

 Renaissancebrought 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, as an entertaining literature to be compared to Giovanni Boccaccio's Decamerone (^{Holubar, 1991; Tramezzino (ed), 1557;Remer, 1963; van Andel, 1994}). Translations into other languages followed suit (^{Fick and Hilka, (eds) 1932; Remer, 1963}). Enlightenment provided the next step. 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." The item he referred to was a picture of Bianca Capello (1548–1587) and her crest, modified by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in consequence of their liaison (^{van Andel, 1994}). Semantically, the referral points to the island of Sri Lanka (Ceylon of yesteryear). Serendipis the historical Arabo-Persian- form of Sri Lanka, a word with Sanskrit (Pali) origin, naming the island of Singhalese Sinhala dvipaand kept alive in folk tales and legends of this area.

The original corpus of tales contained a multiplicity of wondrous stories which are beyond the scope of this short note. The travels of the three princes provide a narrative framework of the complex of legendary events. These three young men, sons of the king of Serendip, were sent abroad by their father in order to learn and gain experience.

Entry 4.  El llibre és una re-edició ampliada d'un treball del 1954! Per veure el contingut ens basta amb els comentaris de la poderosa amazon.com, especialment la llarga recensió del Washinton Post.
The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A study in sociological semantics and the sociology of science (paperback)
The story of serendipity is fascinating; that of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, equally so. Merton shows that Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon championed the word in medical papers and popular talks, but that it was still being defined in context -- a sign of its strangeness -- well into the 1950s. In fact, Merton calculates that serendipity appeared in print only 135 times before he and Barber completed the manuscript of TTAAOS.

PD: D'una mena similar, 

un excel.lent llibre de Jeremy Seal,

 Nicholas: The Epic Journey from Saint to Santa Claus, 

que vaig trobar per 

serendipity!