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The Three Princes of Serendi

One thing that seems to trouble Chinese learners of English more than others is that "new words are hard to remember".

Even advanced learners, such as readers of this column (wink, wink), say so.

While that may be true, all is not doom and gloom. At least sometimes a new word is easy to remember - and in fact quite hard to forget if you learn their story.

Take the word "serendipity" for example. It means the discovery of something good by accident. Or, in the words of Julius H. Comroe, a biomedical researcher, "serendipity is looking for a needle in a haystack and finding the Farmer's Daughter".

A few years ago, there was a BBC program titled Serendipity of Science addressing a series of such happy incidents in scientific studies. A webpage describing the program (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/serendipity.shtml) says, in part:

"The most well-known example of medical serendipity has to be Fleming's discovery of Penicillin, when a mould landed on his culture plate and killed off his bacteria…

"And one of the most famous new drugs of the last decade - Viagra - owes its existence to serendipity. It started its life as a potential treatment for angina, and was being tested in clinical trials. As an angina treatment, it was pretty useless, but then the researchers began to get reports of some unexpected side effects..."

According to Oxford English Dictionary, serendipity was "coined by Horace Walpole, who says (Let. to Mann, 28 Jan. 1754) that he had formed it upon the title of the fairy-tale 'The Three Princes of Serendip', the heroes of which 'were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of'."