I Have a Question

Yesterday I was writing about spiral hot dogs and I used serendipity to describe the happy coincidence of writing about hot dogs on National Hot Dog Day.  While I was proofreading my post I got that feeling that I regularly get when using big words – what if I’m using this word incorrectly? When I get this feeling, I usually try to find definitions and examples on the web to help guide me in using a term properly.  Nine times out of ten the web is less than helpful (I know, so hard to imagine) so I completely rewrite the sentence avoiding the questionable word all together.

When I got that feeling about serendipity, I did my usual next step of turning to the internet.  There I learned that according to the British company Today Translations, who in 2004 surveyed 1000 linguists to determine the most difficult words to translate, serendipity is one of the top 10 most difficult to translate English words. 

At least I thought I had learned that.  After doing more research, the website Global Oneness (http://www.experiencefestival.com/) refuted this claim, noting that “Serendipity has originated equivalents in some other languages (e.g., Portuguese serendipicidade and French serendipicité).”  So I didn’t learn that serendipity was one of the top 10 English words most difficult to translate after all.  

Well, then what did I learn yesterday, you might ask?  In following the serendipity trail I learned that in Russia I could be considered a Pochemuchka.  In Russian that’s a person who asks a lot of questions.  It is also considered one of the hardest words in the world to translate by Today Translations, though whether that claim is true could be questionable based on their previously unreliable list of tough to translate words.  Pochemuchka is usually reserved for describing kids who ask to many questions, but I am a true kid at heart so I’d say it fits.

I’d also say that today’s learning was pure serendipity.