Fortuitous. What exactly does it ‘really’ mean?
In a recent BBC Radio Food and Drink programme, the following was heard, in a description of an award-winning project – the Good Life Project – to monitor the emotional well-being of livestock.
Image by Jonas Koel, courtesy of Unsplash. Header image by RhondaK Native Florida Folk Artist, also courtesy Unsplash. I reproduce an extensive quote to provide sufficient context:
All the supply chains had a raft of data going back years and years and years…But what we were desperately looking for was something that would allow us to consider the emotional well-being of those animals…and I heard about Françoise and her work with QBA (Qualitative Behaviour Assessment) and it was a eureka moment…now we were also very fortuitous because at that time Françoise was developing an app for use on mobile phones which we’re now rolling out over all 1,800 Waitrose livestock farmers…
(Spoken by Andrew Booth, one of the dairy farmers involved with the project.)
Now, apart from the fact fortuitous is being applied to a person, which surprised me, what does it mean here? Does it just mean ‘fortunate, lucky’ or does it mean ‘by a lucky chance or coincidence’? Or just ‘by chance’? It clearly can’t mean the last, applied as it is to someone; by the same token, I somehow doubt if it means ‘by a lucky chance or coincidence’.
Only Mr Booth could tell us what he meant – and even then, he might not be so very sure.
In the minds and on the tongues of many speakers, it appears to mean nothing more and nothing less than ‘fortunate’, as in this example:
But that’s wrong, isn’t it? Surely there has to be some element of chance involved and invoked.The opening of his firm had come at an extremely fortuitous time.
Well, that is how a traditionalist would view the word, particularly if they have any Classical knowledge.
The word is a borrowing of the Latin adjective fortuitus, meaning ‘happening by chance’. That word in turn derives from fors, ‘chance’.
Tangentially, Tacitus has a wonderful phrase in his description of how Nero intended to have his mother, Agrippina, murdered by drowning at sea: nihil tam capax fortuitorum quam mare (‘Nothing so susceptible to accidents as the sea’, where the neuter plural fortuita is being used as a noun for ‘things that happen by chance, accidents’).
In the first edition of Fowler (1926), Henry Fowler noted and condemned the use of fortuitous to mean ‘fortunate’, ‘perhaps’. as he put it, ‘through mere sound’.
He cross-referred that use to his entry for malaprops (malapropisms) and from there to his list of pairs and snares, that is, pairs of words that are easily confused.
But that was getting on for a century ago and meanings, like fashion, have moved on – though Dot Wordsworth, that doyenne and guardian of linguistic propriety, seems to regret as much in the case of fortuitous. Most dictionaries now recognise a meaning associated with good fortune, but they do so in subtly different ways.
For a moment, let’s suppose that meanings can be given a hard border, using that Johnsonian (Samuel, not Boris) analogy (academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders;…)
On that assumption, there are three meanings: 1) occurring by chance, accidental; 2) occurring by fortunate or lucky chance, or occurring in such a way as to produce a favourable or beneficial outcome; 3) fortunate (applying to events and people).
Merriam-Webster online plumps for all three, in the order 1, 3, 2, and lumps 3 and 2 together as subsenses.
Oxford online again puts 1 first, and then blends 2 and 3 into a single dual definition ‘happening by a lucky chance; fortunate’.
In a usage note, it adds that some people will consider our 2 and 3 incorrect.
The Collins Cobuild dictionary takes a similar tack in its chatty definitional style: ‘You can describe something as fortuitous if it happens, by chance, to be very successful or pleasant.’
Collins Unabridged (scroll down to after the Cobuild entry) covers all three meanings but does so, economically, in one tripartite definition: ‘happening by chance, esp by a lucky chance; unplanned; accidental’
In practice, it’s easy to see that people will often want to ascribe a satisfactory outcome to chance, with the idea of Fortune being in their favour. In which case, meanings 2 and 3 above become practically identical. Take out that ‘by chance’ in the Cobuild definition above and you are left with a synonym of ‘fortunate’.
Image by Carson Arias, courtesy of Unsplash. That said, I was still taken aback by the quotation at the start of this post. I was quite used to fortuitous as ‘fortunate’ referring to events, but to refer it to people was new to me. However, it could possibly prove how much that meaning is now, for many people, its main meaning: simply a best bib-and-tucker version of ‘fortunate’, or fortunate on stilts. Alternatively, of course, it could be just another demonstration of how ambiguous the word now is.
What would I do if I wanted to make my meaning clear? Instead of huffing and puffing that, well really, people ought to know what words mean and indulging in the etymological fallacy, I might choose a paraphrase, such as ‘by a happy coincidence’, ‘as it turned out’ or something similar.
Over to you.
