28 January

Horace Walpole coins the word ‘serendipity’

1754 Son of Robert Walpole, the powerful Whig politician who invented for himself the post of Prime Minister, Horace was the popular writer who invented the gothic novel. The gothic tale often pretended to be a ‘translation’ of a long-lost manuscript relating the hauntings and horrors of a medieval castle, abbey or country house.

Walpole’s prototype of the genre, The Castle of Otranto, came out in 1764, and purported to be Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto. When in a preface to the third edition Walpole acknowledged his authorship, he promptly lost much of his critical support and started a debate on whether fiction should be ‘romantic’ – that is, fanciful – or true to life.

As a contribution to thought, however, that was nothing compared to his coining the word ‘serendipity’. Serendipity is the chance discovery of something fortunate when you’re looking for something else. The concept has proved crucial to scientific thought and policy. Roy J. Plunket, for example, discovered Teflon when he was searching for a gas to be used in refrigeration. The British scientist William Ramsay first isolated the element helium, which he named after the Greek god of the sun, because while looking for argon he noticed an unknown gas with a yellow line seen in the spectrum of the sun. Alexander Fleming came across penicillin when he returned from holiday to find that some cultures of bacteria that he had left behind had been killed by penicillium mould that had accidentally got into the Petri dishes. And so on.

Walpole himself described serendipity as ‘accidental sagacity’. As he explained in a letter written on this day, he got the word from ‘a silly tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip” [the old Arabic name for present-day Sri Lanka], who were always making discoveries … of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a camel 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’.

Scientists are always coming up with new words for their new discoveries. In fact the enormous vocabulary of English owes a lot to the English-speaking nations’ pre-eminence in science (see 10 June). Hence radar (for radio detection and ranging), laser (light amplification by

stimulated emission of radiation) and X-ray – itself a serendipitous discovery by Wilhelm Roentgen while investigating cathode ray tubes.

Wordsmiths they may be, but authors are less prolific with neologisms. Of course there are exceptions. Shakespeare, who sometimes seems to have given us words for half our imaginings, came up with ‘puke’, ‘gossip’, ‘swagger’, ‘unreal’, ‘critic’ and many more. But a lot of his verbal inventions are really old words in new combinations or grammatical uses, like ‘blood-stained’, or ‘blanket’ as a verb.

Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘Jabberwocky’ in Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) is often cited as a treasure house of neologisms. But of the 24 new words there (all patiently glossed to Alice by Humpty Dumpty, who can ‘explain all the poems that were ever invented – and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet’), only ‘chortled’ has survived into common usage.

More recently Martin Amis seemed to be transforming the language of transatlantic public relations in his brilliant Money: A Suicide Note (1984). For a while people really did go around London talking of ‘rug-rethinks’ for haircuts and ‘blastfurters’ for hot dogs. But it didn’t last.

No, it was Horace Walpole who did the business. He invented a word that the philosophy of thought really needed, and that has therefore entered most of the world’s languages more or less unchanged.