What does “quelle coinkydink” mean? The Urban Dictionary says it means “What a coincidence.” “Quelle” is from the French for “what a,” and “coinkydink” is a “jocular alteration of coincidence.”
I’m not sure if I believe in coincidence, which is defined as “a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.” I think the key word in that definition is “apparent.” Maybe there’s a higher order that arranges the things we think of as coincidence. Greater minds than mine have considered the question.
Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the famous Nobel Prize-winning German theologian, organist, philosopher, physician and medical missionary in Africa, once said, “Coincidence is the pseudonym dear God chooses when he wants to remain incognito.”
We usually think of a coincidence as a collection of two or more events or conditions, closely related by time, space, form or other associations that don’t appear to have a cause-and-effect relationship that we can observe, right?
Let me give you an example. A couple of weeks ago, my favorite Wisconsin essayist, Michael Perry, wrote an essay in the State Journal in which he mentioned timothy grass. It was a little fluff piece about childhood memories, and, of course, it sent me back to my own childhood.
Here’s what he said: “Whenever I pass by a head of green timothy, I tug at it. It’s a reflex going back to the days when I was a farm boy no taller than the timothy itself. If the plant is young, and you draw at the head – composed of spikelets raspy as a cat’s tongue – with steady pressure, the stalk will suddenly give and slide tightly from the clasping leaves. The butt end of the stalk is moist and tender, and I take small bites with my incisors – nip, nip, nip – and chew the bits, which taste like a mild celery.”
I’ll bet there are a lot of old farm kids like me who can remember doing that, right?
So, OK, that essay appeared in the Sunday Wisconsin State Journal. I read it before we went to Mass that Sunday. One of the readings at that Mass was from 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 17-18. Timothy! Like timothy grass? Later that day, we got involved in a series of e-mails and a “Google hang out” (like Skype) with our son TJ (whose real name is Timothy). Wow!
But I’m not done yet! That same evening, I was paging through a wonderful Shutterfly picture book put together by our daughter-in-law Nerissa about our monthlong visit in Barcelona last year. One of the photos in the book was of a pet turtle we encountered in a private garden in Cordoba. The turtle’s name? Timothy!
How does that happen? Was that a once-in-a-million coincidence?
Probably not. I did some reading and found out that from a statistical viewpoint, coincidences are inevitable and are often less remarkable than they might appear intuitively. A guy named J. E. Littlewood, who was a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote about the law of truly large numbers in a 1986 book, “Littlewood’s Miscellany.”
He claimed that the average person is alert for about eight hours every day, and something happens to the average person about once a second. At this rate, the average person will experience one million events every 35 days.
This means when you say the chances of something happening are one in a million, it also means about once a month. That’s according to Littlewood. Statisticians refer to the monthly miracle as Littlewood’s Law.
So what do you think? Was it coincidence that I had four distinct incidents in one day involving timothy? There certainly didn’t appear to be any cause-and-effect relationships among them. How do you explain them? Littlewood’s Law? Or was it serendipity? A “fortunate happenstance” or “pleasant surprise”?
Whatever, I thought it was remarkable. Quelle coinkydink!
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