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fortuitous

vkv

Member
Bulgarian
The New York Times is running a blog in which grammar, usage and style are discussed. In this particular case, the editor claims that the author had used fortuitous inappropriately. I beg to differ, although a bit insecurely. What do you think?


AUTHOR -- It being a Friday night and all, a fair amount of children were milling about Yankee Stadium to watch the Yankees play Toronto, and the timing was fortuitous.

EDITOR -- Make it “number of children.” The introductory phrase may also have been a bit too folksy. And while we’re at it — “fortuitous,” strictly speaking, means “by chance,” not “lucky,” as we seem to have intended here.


The Times's After Deadline blog -- http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/after-deadline/?scp=1-spot&sq=after%20deadline&st=cse
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I agree with you. Fortuitous means happening by chance rather than intention. but used informally it means happening by a lucky chance; fortunate. Maybe they don't like informal usage!
Right offhand, VKV, I'd be inclined to agree with the editor's interpretation. A lot of people use "fortuitous" to mean "fortunate", and that seems to be what the writer was trying to say. I'd have to see some pretty convincing context to believe that the writer meant "by chance". M-W's unabridged accepts "fortuitous" as "lucky", but it also allows "unique" to mean "unusual" as well as "one of a kind". I'm a little more conservative than M-W is when it comes to defining words. I prefer to reserve "fortuitous" as a synonym for "by chance".
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I don't contend that the author meant "by chance". I'm just saying that I thought fortuitous could be construed as lucky, happening by chance, but to your advantage.
Thank you, GreenWhiteBlue. You are right about the unfortunate use of frightfully. Frightfully sorry 👁 Smile :)
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I don't contend that the author meant "by chance". I'm just saying that I thought fortuitous could be construed as lucky, happening by chance, but to your advantage.

Again, I agree with you. (I could swear I posted this earlier today). Fortuitous means happening by chance rather than intention. And informally it means happening by a lucky chance; fortunate. Maybe the editors of the newspaper do not care for informal speech.
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