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The first noted use of "serendipity" was by Horace Walpole on 28 January 1754. In a letter he wrote to his friend Horace Mann, Walpole explained an unexpected discovery he had made about a lost painting of Bianca Cappello by Giorgio Vasari [9] by reference to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip.
"Paraprosdokian" derives from Greek παρά "against" and προσδοκία "expectation". [2] [3] The noun prosdokia occurs with the preposition para in Greek rhetorical writers of the 1st century BCE and the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, with the meaning "contrary to expectation" or "unexpectedly."
A sneaker wave incident gained worldwide media attention when two large waves suddenly and unexpectedly struck a crowd watching the Mavericks surfing competition at Mavericks in Princeton-by-the-Sea, California, on February 13, 2010, breaking over a seawall onto a narrow beach and injuring at least 13 people. [2] [22] The incident was caught on ...
Afrikaans – as die perde horings kry ("when horses grow horns"); Albanian – ne 36 gusht ("on the thirty-sixth of August"); Arabic has a wide range of idioms differing from a region to another.
At the species level, subjective synonyms are common because of an unexpectedly large range of variation in a species, or simple ignorance about an earlier description, may lead a biologist to describe a newly discovered specimen as a new species. A common reason for objective synonyms at this level is the creation of a replacement name.
The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index fell unexpectedly to 45 in May, the lowest since January, from 51 a month earlier. NAHB measures of current sales, sales ...
An erosion gully in Australia caused by rabbits, an unintended consequence of their introduction as game animals. In the social sciences, unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated consequences or unforeseen consequences, more colloquially called knock-on effects) are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen.
A tornado is an example of an extreme weather event. This tornado struck Anadarko, Oklahoma during a tornado outbreak in 1999.. Extreme weather includes unexpected, unusual, severe, or unseasonal weather; weather at the extremes of the historical distribution—the range that has been seen in the past.