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© Copyright 2001, Jim Loy
Trivia is trivial, it would seem. Trivia is of course relatively unimportant knowledge, such as Mickey Mantle's lifetime batting average. "Trivial" means unimportant. These two words come from the trivium, which were grammar, rhetoric, and logic, in the Middle Ages. Apparently "trivium" meant a "public place" in Latin, literally "a place where three roads meet." The rest of the liberal arts were the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Four roads met there. The quadrivium was judged to be on a higher philosophical plane, more advanced, than the trivium. This relative lesser status of the trivium eventually led to "trivia" and "trivial" being "unimportant."
Incidentally, "quadrivial," in the title of this article, is an actual word, meaning "pertaining to the quadrivium," or "having four ways or roads or directions."