For awhile now I’ve been fascinated with the idea of serendipity. I was actually going to write a book on the topic but had to shelve it when we started Percolate. (A choice I’m very happy with, as tech industry > book industry.) Anyway, the core idea of the book was going to be that serendipity is something you can both encourage and design for. Because of that I read anything I see that talks about serendipity and was pleasantly surprised by this post on Medium by Stef Lewandowski on the subject. I’ll let you read it yourself, he hits on a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about, but wanted to share a word he introduced me to: “Zemblanity.” As he explains, “Zemblanity, a word coined by William Boyd in his book Armadillo in the 1980s, is the polar opposite of serendipity.” He goes on to quote the book for the full definition:
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.
I’ve definitely found myself in zemblanity at times and I usually have to read my way out. It’s nice to have a word to use in case it happens again in the future.
January 8, 2014 // This post is about: ideas, serendipity, words
I really enjoyed this FT review of a few books on the origin of words and misspellings. Especially interesting was this note on how dictionaries came to represent current language:
Why did the editors of Webster’s Third drop this lexicographic A-bomb (another addition to the dictionary)? Because views on dictionaries, indeed on language itself, had changed. Instead of laying down rules on how people should write and speak, dictionaries became records of how people did write and speak. And that meant all the people, not just those who spoke the educated language of New England. The new trends in lexicography went along with the growth of scientific method and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution: lexicographers observed what was happening to the language, rather than handing down precepts.
December 23, 2012 // This post is about: dictionary, evolution, language, words, WRITING
Earlier this year I remember reading this short article from MIT on some research that showed word length had more to do with information being communicated than frequency of occurrence. Ran across it again and thought it was worth sharing:
Why are some words short and others long? For decades, a prominent theory has held that words used frequently are short in order to make language efficient: It would not be economical if “the” were as long as “phenomenology,” in this view. But now a team of MIT cognitive scientists has developed an alternative notion, on the basis of new research: A word’s length reflects the amount of information it contains.
The article goes on to explain, “For English words, 9 percent of the variation in length is due to amount of information, and 1 percent stems from frequency.” Not entirely sure what to do with this yet, but seems worth knowing.
November 27, 2011 // This post is about: language, science, words
