zemblanity
noun

- the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky, and expected discoveries; the opposite of serendipity.

- a patterned and preventable form of misfortune built into the way a system, organisation, or individual operates; bad luck that emerges not from chance but from accumulated choices and ignored warnings.

- the knack for turning what should have been avoidable into the inevitable; an unpleasant unsurprise.

World Wide Words, LSE Business Review, Wikipedia

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WORD ORIGIN

In 1998, Scottish author William Boyd published his novel Armadillo. In it, he asked: if serendipity — coined by Horace Walpole in 1754 from Serendip, the old Persian name for Sri Lanka, a warm island of spice, colour, and unexpected gifts — needed an opposite, what would that opposite be called?

Boyd looked north. Far north. Novaya Zemlya (Russian: “new land”) is a bleak Arctic archipelago between the Barents and Kara Seas, used by the Soviet Union as its primary nuclear testing site. In English it was long rendered as Nova Zembla, and had appeared in literature for centuries as a byword for cold, desolation, and the uttermost edge of the known world — in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, in Charlotte Brontë, in Jules Verne. Boyd compressed the place name: Zembla → zemblan → zemblanity, built on the suffix -ity (from Latin -itas, denoting a state or quality), exactly mirroring the construction of serendip-ity.

Boyd almost certainly had a second source in mind: Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire (1962), whose narrator, the possibly deranged Charles Kinbote, claims to be the exiled king of a fictional northern land called Zembla — itself drawn from Nova Zembla. In Nabokov’s version, the name may also derive from the fictional Semblerland, “land of resemblers” or reflections. Boyd took that cold, nuclear-shadowed place and turned it into a concept: the predictable discovery of what we don’t want to know.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

asking for trouble, avoidable disaster, back against the wall, bad luck by design, bed of one’s own making, between a rock and a hard place, brewing disaster, building to fail, caught in a trap of one’s own making, chickens coming home to roost, consequences catching up, courting disaster, creeping failure, cut one’s own throat, design flaw, destined for trouble, digging one’s own grave, doom by design, downfall in the making, engineered failure, fait accompli, fall of one’s own making, foreseeable catastrophe, foreseeable misfortune, getting what was coming, going down a road you know leads nowhere, hardwired failure, heading for a fall, heading for trouble, hostage to fortune, if it can go wrong it will, in deep water of one’s own making, in for it, inexorable outcome, inevitable reckoning, karma, known unknowns, latent failure, logical consequence, long time coming, looking for trouble, manufactured misfortune, meeting one’s Waterloo, Murphy’s Law, normalisation of deviance, on a collision course, on borrowed time, one’s own worst enemy, organisational fragility, path dependency, playing with fire, predictable disaster, preventable failure, pyrrhic choice, racing towards the cliff, reap what you sow, riding for a fall, self-defeating behaviour, self-fulfilling prophecy, self-inflicted wound, setting oneself up for a fall, setting the stage for disaster, structural fragility, structural risk, ZEMBLANITY, tempting fate, the writing was on the wall, time bomb, too little too late, unintended consequence, unpleasant unsurprise, walking into a trap, what goes around comes around, writing on the wall

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"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from." — Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

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