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Serendipity, or the art of finding what you're not looking for.(News)

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From: The Sunday Independent (South Africa)
Date: 20060827
Author:

Serendipity is such a perfect word for what it defines that it might have been serendipity itself that inspired Horace Walpole to coin it.

The word comes from the original name for Sri Lanka, "Serendip", the setting for The Three Princes of Serendip, a fable of three nobles who make discoveries by accident. Through their sagacity they deduce, for instance, by the kind of reasoning used by Sherlock Holmes, that the road they have been travelling along must also have been used by a mule blind in one eye, because the grass had been grazed on only one verge.

Serendipity has ...

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