This is awe­some.

So the English word “serendip­i­ty”, which is dif­fi­cult to trans­late into oth­er lan­guages, comes from a sto­ry named The Three Princes of Serendip. If you’re inter­est­ed, you can read sto­ry in it’s entire­ty (it’s short) on Wikipedia.

The strangest part is when one of the princes deduces that a woman was near­by:

I guessed that the camel must have car­ried a woman, because I had noticed that near the tracks where the ani­mal had knelt down the imprint of a foot was vis­i­ble. Because some urine was near by, I wet my fin­gers and as a reac­tion to its odour I felt a sort of car­nal con­cu­pis­cence, which con­vinced me that the imprint was of a woman’s foot.

Which basi­cal­ly means that this guy noticed a pud­dle of pee, dipped his fin­gers in it, smelled his fin­gers, then got horny, plus or minus hard-on.

That is some medieval Sherlock Homes deduc­tion shit going on there. What if he lat­er found out it was real­ly moose pee? Would he be able to admit to him­self that he was sex­u­al­ly attract­ed to moose?