Every Day Is Special: January 28

January 28 - Serendipity!

Posted on January 28, 2022

This is an update of my post published on January 28, 2011:

It can seem weird to think about words being invented. When a new species of bird or a new planet is discovered, we immediately understand that that bird or planet will need to be named. If someone invents a new machine never before seen on Earth, of course she or he will need to invent a name for that machine. But how do other sorts of words get invented?

First of all, we usually say a new word is coined, not invented.

Second, often creative and imaginative authors coin new words. That is what happened with the word serendipity.

In 1754, an art historian and writer named Horace Walpole was writing a letter to another man named Horace (Horace Mann), and he needed a word for a discovery made through a happy accident. He remembered what he thought of as a silly fairy tale, "The Three Princes of Serendip," in which some princes discover the nature of a lost camel mostly through lucky accidents. (By the way, Serendip is the Persian name for Sri Lanka.) Referencing that 1557 fairy tale, Walpole referred to a lucky accident as a serendipity.

So...Walpole single-handedly coined the term serendipity, meaning unplanned and happy discovery, and not only did his word catch on, it became one of the most popular words in the English language. (In a 2000 poll taken in the United Kingdom, it ranked the nation's #1 favorite word!!) I'm on the serendipity train, too; when I was 10 or 11, I told everyone I knew that it was my favorite word in the whole wide world. (I hadn't yet been exposed to cool German-adopted-by-English words such as doppelgänger and zeitgeist. And I didn't yet appreciate the humble and funny-sounding words my dad used, like shenanigans and cockamamie.)

This is called Serendipity Cave.

Walpole is credited with coining or popularizing other words such as beefy, malaria, souvenir, and nuance.

Other coiners of words...

Shakespeare is famous for having coined words and phrases, although it may be that some of the words attributed to him were in use but had not yet been written. Words such as eyeball, honey-tongued, gloomy, and fanged are just a few of the many, many words that first appeared in print in a Shakespeare play or sonnet. If you want to check out an entire list of Shakespeare's coinages, go here.

Lewis Carroll (yesterday's birthday boy) also invented words. He didn't necessarily take words that already existed and put them together (as Shakespeare did with eye + ball), nor did he necessarily reference stories (as Walpole did with serendipity). He just flat-out invented nonsense words. Yet some of his nonsense words have been picked up and are these days used as real words: chortle, galumph, burble.

Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report, along with his writers, invented the word truthiness, which means a so-called "truth" that a person "knows from the gut" or from emotional appeal - but which has no relation to evidence or logic.

People are still coining words. New technology terms like app and tweet have been coined, and some bad economic times have spurred the development of words like sub-prime and bailout. The pandemic has been a terrible time for humans, but a great time to invent new words and terms. Everything from coronababies to covidiot, elbow bump to doomscrolling, virtual happy hour to zooming, SAH order to PPE...