Being quite a fan of serendipity, I found this post very interesting! xx Rowena
On the 28th of January 1754, in a letter to Horace Mann, eighteenth-century English author Horace Walpole coined the word serendipity in the English language: “I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip [the ancient name for Ceylon, or 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 instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right? Now do you understand Serendipity?” In its current usage, serendipity means a fortuitous discovery, a positive chance happening.
In 1958, American sociologists Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber wrote a very interesting book – shelved for forty years, and only printed in…
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