zemblanity

What doesn't kill me makes me increasingly disappointed.

The arctic island is actually called Novaya Zemlya, which in Russian simply means "New Land." "Nova Zembla" represents an older Dutch, and then English, mispronunciation. So "zemblanity" (a word I like, actually) was itself born of a mistake. How appropriate.

The opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and unexpected discoveries by design; the inexorable discovery of what we don't what to know. Word derived from Zembla, an barren, frigid Artic island -- Nova Zembla -- the site of a nuclear facility now used for testing non-nuclear explosives.
-Peter Bowler