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Originally posted by Dave W.

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Originally posted by HalfMooner

Q: How did the term, "trivia" originate?

A: The word most likely comes from Latin, the prefix "Tri-" meaning three, paired with "via," road. In ancient Rome, a "trivium" was simply the intersection of three roads. Due to the good business location, taverns would often be located at trivia (plural). People would naturally tend to meet strangers and old acquaintances at trivia and stop to exchange both useful information and inconsequential details about the places from which they'd come. Such impromptu conversations, and their often interesting but unimportant contents, became characterized as being as "trivial."

Now you can dazzle the dull-witted with this trivia.

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Interestingly, the etymologies that I find on the Web suggests it's not the conversations, but everything about such places that spawned the term:

Word History: The word trivial entered Middle English with senses quite different from its most common contemporary ones. We find in a work from 1432-50 mention of the “arte trivialle,” an allusion to the three liberal arts that made up the trivium, the lower division of the seven liberal arts taught in medieval universities - grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The history of trivial goes back to the Latin word trivium, formed from the prefix tri-, “three,” and via, “road.” Trivium thus meant “the meeting place of three roads, especially as a place of public resort.” The publicness of such a place also gave the word a pejorative sense that we express in the phrase the gutter, as in “His manners were formed in the gutter.” The Latin adjective trivialis, derived from trivium, thus meant “appropriate to the street corner, commonplace, vulgar.” Trivial is first recorded in English with a sense identical to that of trivialis in 1589. Shortly after that trivial is recorded in the sense most familiar to us, “of little importance or significance,” making it a word now used of things less weighty than grammar, rhetoric, and logic.

- Dictionary.com

I don't think this is a trivial difference.

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Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. (Ezekiel 23:19-20)

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Originally posted by HalfMooner

I have faith that my etymology is the correct one. Dictionary.com has, sadly, fallen into heresy with its version. As have you, Dave.

For is it not written:

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Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. (Ezekiel 23:19-20)

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Originally posted by Gorgo

Can you use that in a sentence?

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Originally posted by Gorgo

That's one purty sentence.

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