Month: June 2016

Here’s a trivia question for you.  What is the etymology of the word trivia?  Maybe this will surprise you.

The word is derived from the roman words tre and via (three roads) and alluded to a meeting place.  That led to the connotation of commonplace.

That in turn led to its use to refer to the study of grammar, rhetoric and logic in the English public schools, an undergraduate curriculum, in which no graduate student could be interested.  They were trivial.  The real subjects, the more challenging ones, were arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.