The Wit’s Guide to Serendipity

Or, CaMeLcAsE

Camel, Charles Théodore Frère, 1860.

Serendipity, I’m sorry to report, is a sham. The concept of finding just what you needed when you weren’t even looking for it — a very useful idea, especially in the realm of scientific discovery — has a rich and colourful etymology that, upon examination, doesn’t make any sense. But in a way, that makes it even better.

“I define serendipity as the art of making an unsought finding.”
— Pek Van Andel

Serendipity means to be Sri Lankan, more or less. Serendip is the ancient Persian word for that island, the setting for an Italian fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip. In that story, first published in Venice in 1557, a king sends his three wonderful sons abroad to become wise in the ways of the world. They carefully observe all that they encounter, a habit that gets them into trouble when they meet a merchant whose camel has been stolen.

“One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.”
— Thomas Schelling

The merchant asks if they’ve seen his camel, and the boys in turn ask if the dromedary in question was blind in one eye, missing a tooth, carrying a load of butter on one side and honey on the other, and ridden by a pregnant woman. Yes, the merchant replies, that’s my camel! Oh, we haven’t seen it, the brothers reply. This response lands like a load of ungulate dung and the boys are soon hauled before the court as camel thieves. How could they know so much? Is this, you might suspect, serendipity?

“I like the way you manage to state the obvious with a sense of real discovery.”
— Gore Vidal

It is not. Rather, it’s the sort of ludicrously fine-grained detective work most associated with Sherlock Holmes. You see, the brothers had seen camel prints and noticed that the grass had been grazed upon one side of the road, suggesting partial blindness of a beast of burden. They spotted clumps of grass on the ground that could have fallen out of a toothhole. They noticed flies on one side of the road thanks to the honey and ants on the other for the butter. And then, weirdly, they came across the location of the rider’s rest stop and sniffed out urine with “a sort of carnal concupiscence,” which suggested a pregnant woman. Hey, it was the 1500s.

“Art must take reality by surprise.”
— Françoise Sagan

This is … interesting, but not serendipitous by our definition of the term. Still, the writer Horace Walpole misremembered the story and, in a 1754 letter to another guy named Horace, described this “silly fairy tale” about princes “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of” to describe his recent research about a detail of a painting. This, he proclaimed, required a new word: Serendipity!

“Serendipity is jumping into a haystack to search for a needle, and coming up with the farmer’s daughter.”
— Julius Comroe

So this concept credited for the discovery of everything from penicillin to popsicles was coined by someone who didn’t remember his source material to describe something so inconsequential it barely qualified. But somehow, this miscarriage of etymology created a word once voted the best in the English language. That’s serendipity!

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“So what is the opposite of Serendip, a southern land of spice and warmth, lush greenery and hummingbirds, seawashed, sunbasted? Think of another world in the far north, barren, icebound, cold, a world of flint and stone. Call it Zembla. Ergo: zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design.”
— William Boyd

I’m not sure I totally get this one, but I know I have some major Boydheads in my readership (hi Jake!) and perhaps they can pop off in the comments. For next week, maybe it’s finally time for some foibles with a capital F?

Approximately each month, my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This month’s issue went out on Monday and it’s full of delightful and short summer novels!

And this week, I came across an enjoyably turned phrase and a loving parody.

First, in a daring piece of lifestyle journalism, Sam Anderson tried to find out if buying very expensive clothes would improve his life. I don’t want to ruin it (here’s a gift link), but I loved this sentence about trying on a hat and will now think of it every time I slice open an alligator pear:

“It was plain blue, no logo, and it fit my head like an avocado fits its pit.”

And second, this interview with the singer-comedian Kyle Gordon was as entertaining to read as his new video Mr. Jambo is to watch. It’s a genre parody of Paul Simon’s Graceland and perfectly encapsulates how if you make fun the right way, you actually create more fun in the world. Or as Gordon put it:

“Let me just say for the record: Graceland is one of my favorite albums, and I think it’s one of the greatest pop albums of all time. It’s a stunning masterpiece. But the lyrics are essentially him singing over Ladysmith Black Mambazo and then singing about how he’s depressed because he got divorced from Princess Leia and he’s awkward at Upper West Side parties.”

Get Wit Quick No. 380 is, like the love you seek, in the valley of the soul. If you found this newsletter by accident, you have fulfilled the prophecy. If you subscribed a long time ago and finally read one of these emails down to the end, that also works. The Camel Case subtitle was too clever by half. The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. If you accidentally tap the ❤️ below whilst trying to delete this email, I’ll know you’ve stolen my pregnant camel.