Friday, December 4, 2009

Serendipity: great English Language word of the week


Another gem from the English language. To find something fortunate, when you have been looking for something else. Any works of literature or movies that you care to send in, which illustrate the definition of our word of the week, is greatly appreciated! And here is a FAB photo of Joan Crawford for you. Sorry no credit on it--but she used to pose for hours in MGM costumes for a photographer, whose work of her became famous. He took thousands of photos of her. I read a book about it with all the glorious photos, and MGM dresses and beautiful young ambitious Joanie. I could probably find out the name of the book if I go digging around at Amazon. I know I checked it out at Columbine.

The following definition is taken from Wikipedia:

Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally stumbles upon something fortunate, especially while looking for something entirely unrelated. The word has been voted as one of the ten English words that were hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company.[1] However, due to its sociological use, the word has been imported into many other languages (Portuguese serendipicidade or serendipidade; French sérendipicité or sérendipité but also heureux hasard, "fortunate chance"; Italian serendipità; Dutch serendipiteit; German Serendipität; Swedish, Danish and Norwegian serendipitet; Romanian serendipitate; Spanish serendipia).

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