Trivia
Encyclopedia
The trivia are the three lower Artes Liberales, i.e. grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...

, rhetoric
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...

 and logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...

. These were the topics of basic education
Basic education
Basic education refers to the whole range of educational activities taking place in various settings , that aim to meet basic learning needs. According to the International Standard Classification of Education , basic education comprises primary education and lower secondary education...

, foundational to the quadrivia of higher education, and hence the material of basic education, of interest only to undergraduates. The word trivia was also used to describe a place where three roads met in Ancient Rome.

The term had become, during the 20th Century, as forgotten as the system of education it pertained to when it was ironically appropriated to mean something very new. In the 1960s, nostalgic college students and others began to informally trade questions and answers about the popular culture of their youth. The first known documented labeling of this casual parlor game as "Trivia" was in a Columbia Daily Spectator
Columbia Daily Spectator
Columbia Daily Spectator is the daily student newspaper of Columbia University. It is published at 112th and Broadway in New York, New York. Founded in 1877, it is the oldest continuously operating college news daily in the nation after The Harvard Crimson, and has been legally independent of the...

 column published on February 5, 1965. The authors, Ed Goodgold and Dan Carlinsky, then started the first organized trivia contests, described below. Since the 1960s, the plural trivia in particular has widened to include knowledge that is nice to have but not essential, specifically detailed knowledge on topics of popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...

. The expression has also come to suggest information of the kind useful almost exclusively for answering quiz
Quiz
A quiz is a form of game or mind sport in which the players attempt to answer questions correctly. In some countries, a quiz is also a brief assessment used in education and similar fields to measure growth in knowledge, abilities, and/or skills.Quizzes are usually scored in points and many...

 questions, hence the brand name Trivial Pursuit
Trivial Pursuit
Trivial Pursuit is a board game in which progress is determined by a player's ability to answer general knowledge and popular culture questions. The game was created in 1979 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, by Canadian Chris Haney, a photo editor for Montreal's The Gazette and Scott Abbott, a sports...

(1982).

Etymology

The Latin neuter noun trivium (plural trivia) is from tri- "triple" and via "way", meaning "a place where three ways meet". The pertaining adjective is triviālis. The adjective trivial was adopted in Early Modern English
Early Modern English
Early Modern English is the stage of the English language used from about the end of the Middle English period to 1650. Thus, the first edition of the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare both belong to the late phase of Early Modern English...

, while the noun trivium only appears in learned usage from the 19th century, in reference to the Artes Liberales and the plural trivia in the sense of "trivialities, trifles" only in the 20th century.

The Latin adjective triviālis in Classical Latin besides its literal meaning could have the meaning "appropriate to the street corner, commonplace, vulgar." In late Latin
Late Latin
Late Latin is the scholarly name for the written Latin of Late Antiquity. The English dictionary definition of Late Latin dates this period from the 3rd to the 6th centuries AD extending in Spain to the 7th. This somewhat ambiguously defined period fits between Classical Latin and Medieval Latin...

, it could also simply mean "triple". In medieval Latin
Medieval Latin
Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. Despite the clerical origin of many of its authors,...

, it came to refer to the lower division of the Artes Liberales, namely grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...

, rhetoric
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...

, and logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...

. (The other four Liberal Arts were the quadrivium
Quadrivium
The quadrivium comprised the four subjects, or arts, taught in medieval universities, after teaching the trivium. The word is Latin, meaning "the four ways" , and its use for the 4 subjects has been attributed to Boethius or Cassiodorus in the 6th century...

, namely arithmetic
Arithmetic
Arithmetic or arithmetics is the oldest and most elementary branch of mathematics, used by almost everyone, for tasks ranging from simple day-to-day counting to advanced science and business calculations. It involves the study of quantity, especially as the result of combining numbers...

, geometry
Geometry
Geometry arose as the field of knowledge dealing with spatial relationships. Geometry was one of the two fields of pre-modern mathematics, the other being the study of numbers ....

, music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

, and astronomy
Astronomy
Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...

, which were more challenging.) Hence, trivial in this sense would have meant "of interest only to an undergraduate".

The adjective trivial introduced into English in the 15th to 16th century was influenced by all three meanings of the Latin adjective:
  • A 15th century English translation of Ranulf Higdon
    Ranulf Higdon
    Ranulf Higden was an English chronicler and a Benedictine monk of the monastery of St. Werburgh in Chester....

     mentions the arte trivialle, referring to the trivium of the Liberal Arts.
  • the same work also calls a triuialle distinccion a threefold division. This is due to an application of the term by Arnobius
    Arnobius
    Arnobius of Sicca was an Early Christian apologist, during the reign of Diocletian . According to Jerome's Chronicle, Arnobius, before his conversion, was a distinguished Numidian rhetorician at Sicca Veneria , a major Christian center in Proconsular Africa, and owed his conversion to a...

    , and was never common either in Latin or English.
  • the meaning "trite, commonplace, unimportant, slight" occurs from the late 16th century, notably in the works of Shakespeare.


Trivia was used as a title by Logan Pearsall Smith
Logan Pearsall Smith
Logan Pearsall Smith was an American-born essayist and critic.Smith was born in Millville, New Jersey the son of the prominent Quakers Robert Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith. His father's family had become wealthy from its glass factories...

 in 1902, followed by More Trivia and All Trivia in 1921 and 1933, respectively, collections of short "moral pieces" or aphorisms. Book II of the 1902 publication is headed with a purported quote from "Gay's Trivia, or New Art of Walking Streets of London.",
"Thou, Trivia, goddess, aid my song: Through spacious streets conduct thy bard along."


The February 5, 1965 Columbia Spectator article did not revive the word "trivia"; it humorously applied the grandiose Latin term to topics like, "Who played the Old Gypsy Woman in The Wolfman?" (Answer: Maria Ouspenskaya.) Nor had "trivia" ever implied contests about such matters. Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 students Ed Goodgold and Dan Carlinsky, who had proposed the new use in their original article, swiftly created the earliest inter-collegiate quiz bowls that tested culturally (and emotionally) significant yet essentially unimportant facts, which they dubbed "trivia contests". The first book treating "trivia" in the radical new sense was Trivia (Dell, 1966)-- again by Goodgold and Carlinsky, which achieved a ranking on the New York Times best seller list; the book was an extension of the pair's Columbia contests and was followed by other Goodgold and Carlinsky trivia titles. In their second book, More Trivial Trivia, the authors criticized practitioners who were "indiscriminate enough to confuse the flower of Trivia with the weed of minutiae"; Trivia, they wrote, "is concerned with tugging at heartstrings," while minutiae deals with such unevocative questions as "Which state is the largest consumer of Jell-O?" (Answer: California) But over the years the word has come to refer to obscure and arcane bits of dry knowledge as well as nostalgic remembrances of pop culture.

Quiz shows

Before the books, Goodgold and Carlinsky had already staged contests. The first, held in Columbia's Ferris Booth Hall on March 1 of that year, reported in campus press and the New York Post, was the first occasion in which the pastime was formalized. On , 1965, four Columbia students appeared on the TV quiz show I've Got a Secret
I've Got a Secret
I've Got a Secret is a panel game show produced by Mark Goodson and Bill Todman for CBS television. Created by comedy writers Allan Sherman and Howard Merrill, it was a derivative of Goodson-Todman's own panel show What's My Line?...

and competed in a trivia contest with the show's regular panelists. A much-publicized First Annual Ivy League-Seven Sisters Trivia Contest was held at Columbia the same semester. By 1966, other campuses had instituted Trivia bowls while colleges such as Lawrence University
Lawrence University
Lawrence University is a selective, private liberal arts college with a nationally recognized conservatory of music, in Appleton, Wisconsin. Lawrence University is known for its rigorous academic environment. Founded in 1847, the first classes were held on November 12, 1849...

 and Williams College
Williams College
Williams College is a private liberal arts college located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, United States. It was established in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams. Originally a men's college, Williams became co-educational in 1970. Fraternities were also phased out during this...

 began radio contests which continue to this day. In this manner, the codified form of the diversion became an institution.

In 1974, a former Sacramento
Sacramento, California
Sacramento is the capital city of the U.S. state of California and the county seat of Sacramento County. It is located at the confluence of the Sacramento River and the American River in the northern portion of California's expansive Central Valley. With a population of 466,488 at the 2010 census,...

 air traffic controller
Air traffic controller
Air traffic controllers are the people who expedite and maintain a safe and orderly flow of air traffic in the global air traffic control system. The position of the air traffic controller is one that requires highly specialized skills...

 named Fred L. Worth published The Trivia Encyclopedia, which he followed in 1977 with The Complete Unabridged Super Trivia Encyclopedia, and in 1981 with Super Trivia, vol. II. The popularity of books by Goodgold and Carlinsky, Worth and others in the 1960s and 1970s laid the groundwork for the first edition of the board game Trivial Pursuit
Trivial Pursuit
Trivial Pursuit is a board game in which progress is determined by a player's ability to answer general knowledge and popular culture questions. The game was created in 1979 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, by Canadian Chris Haney, a photo editor for Montreal's The Gazette and Scott Abbott, a sports...

 in the early 1980s.

The enormous success of this game led to the re-launch of Jeopardy!
Jeopardy!
Griffin's first conception of the game used a board comprising ten categories with ten clues each, but after finding that this board could not be shown on camera easily, he reduced it to two rounds of thirty clues each, with five clues in each of six categories...

in the United States, reviving a quiz show genre that had been dormant since the quiz show scandals
Quiz show scandals
The American quiz show scandals of the 1950s were a series of revelations that contestants of several popular television quiz shows were secretly given assistance by the show's producers to arrange the outcome of a supposedly fair competition....

 of the 1950s. The American TV broadcaster ABC
American Broadcasting Company
The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...

 had a surprise hit with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is a television game show which offers large cash prizes for correctly answering a series of multiple-choice questions of increasing difficulty. The format is owned and licensed by Sony Pictures Television International. The maximum cash prize is one million pounds...

, an import of a successful British quiz format which launched another wave of interest in trivia. In both the UK and Canada, the quiz format has enjoyed continuous success since the 1950s, untouched by the scandals that dogged the American format.

In addition to the mass media trivia, there have also been two entrenched trivia subcultures. One is the pub quiz
Pub quiz
A pub quiz is a quiz held in a public house. These events are also called Quiz Nights or Trivia Nights and may be held in other settings. Pub quizzes are still extremely popular and may attract people to a pub who are not found there on other days. The pub quiz is a modern example of a pub game...

 phenomenon, which is especially prevalent in Great Britain and in select U.S. cities, particularly in pubs that serve a large Irish American
Irish American
Irish Americans are citizens of the United States who can trace their ancestry to Ireland. A total of 36,278,332 Americans—estimated at 11.9% of the total population—reported Irish ancestry in the 2008 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau...

 community. (The U.S. pub quiz scene is crimped by the popularity of Buzztime
NTN Buzztime
NTN Buzztime is a company which produces interactive entertainment across many different platforms. Its most well-known product, simply called Buzztime, and formerly known as the NTN Network, since 1985, broadcasts trivia and other games via broadband over a national network to over 3,800 bars...

, a satellite-based game.)

Wilson Casey
Wilson Casey
Wilson Casey is an American columnist, book author, political humorist, entertainer, speaker, and record holder. He earned two Guinness World Records for a thirty-hour live, continuous broadcast on radio station WKDY-AM on January 9–10, 1999 in Spartanburg, South Carolina...

is an American columnist, book author, entertainer, speaker, and record holder. He earned two Guinness World Records (trivia marathon and radio broadcasting) for a thirty-hour live, continuous broadcast on radio station WKDY-AM on January 9–10, 1999 in Spartanburg, South Carolina. During the 30 hours he asked and identified the correct answer to 3,333 questions. Casey is regularly called and labeled "The Trivia Guy". His website, TriviaGuy.com
TriviaGuy.com
TriviaGuy.com is the official website of "Trivia" Guinness World Record holder, Wilson Casey . It was established in 2000 and features Casey's daily 7x/wk trivia columns that are carried by newspapers and direct to consumers....

, provides daily multiple choice trivia questions (with answers) by subscription to newspapers and to the general public.

Quiz bowls

The other subculture is the quizbowl
Quizbowl
Quiz bowl is a family of games of questions and answers on all topics of human knowledge that is commonly played by students enrolled in high school or college, although some participants begin in middle or even elementary school...

 format found in high schools and universities in the U.S., as well as in elementary, middle, and junior high schools; the Canadian equivalent is competition geared toward Reach for the Top
Reach for the Top
Reach for the Top is a Canadian game show in which teams of high school students participate in local, provincial and eventually national trivia tournaments...

, among high schools, whereas Canadian universities are beginning to participate in U.S. quiz bowl leagues.

The largest current trivia contest is held in Stevens Point, Wisconsin
Stevens Point, Wisconsin
Stevens Point is the county seat of Portage County, Wisconsin, United States. Located in the central part of the state, it is the largest city in the county, with a population of 24,551 at the 2000 census...

, at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point
University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point
The University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point is a public university located in Stevens Point, Wisconsin...

's college
College
A college is an educational institution or a constituent part of an educational institution. Usage varies in English-speaking nations...

 radio station WWSP 89.9 FM. This is a college station with 11,500 watts of power and about a 65-mile (105-kilometre) radius, and the contest serves as a fund raiser for the station. The contest is open to anyone, and it is played in April of each year spanning 54 hours over a weekend with eight questions each hour. There are usually 500 teams ranging from 1 to 50 players. The top ten teams are awarded trophies. The 40th WWSP contest was held in April 2009.

The two longest continuous trivia contests in the world are those at Lawrence University and Williams College, which both debuted in the spring of 1966. Lawrence hosts its contest annually, and its 43rd installment was held in January 2008. Unusually, Williams has a separate contest for each semester, and thus its 84th game took place in May 2008.

The University of Colorado
University of Colorado System
The University of Colorado system is a system of public universities in Colorado consisting of three universities in four campuses: University of Colorado Boulder, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, and University of Colorado Denver in downtown Denver and at the Anschutz Medical Campus in...

 Trivia Bowl was a mostly student contest featuring a single-elimination tournament based on the GE College Bowl
College Bowl
College Bowl was a format of college-level quizbowl run and operated by College Bowl Company, Incorporated. It had a format similar to the current NAQT format. College Bowl first aired on US radio stations in 1953, and aired on US television from 1959 to 1970...

. Many of the best trivia players in America trace participation through this tournament including many Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? contestants. The current event now is a regional qualifier for T.R.A.S.H. (Testing Recall About Strange Happenings) and utilizes a round robin competition format.

See also

  • Factoid
    Factoid
    A factoid is a questionable or spurious—unverified, incorrect, or fabricated—statement presented as a fact, but with no veracity. The word can also be used to describe a particularly insignificant or novel fact, in the absence of much relevant context...

  • Pub quiz
    Pub quiz
    A pub quiz is a quiz held in a public house. These events are also called Quiz Nights or Trivia Nights and may be held in other settings. Pub quizzes are still extremely popular and may attract people to a pub who are not found there on other days. The pub quiz is a modern example of a pub game...

  • Trivial (mathematics)
    Trivial (mathematics)
    In mathematics, the adjective trivial is frequently used for objects that have a very simple structure...

  • Trivium (education)
  • FunTrivia
    FunTrivia
    FunTrivia is one of the largest trivia websites on the internet, with over 1.2 million registered users and over 6 million guests. FunTrivia is available in over 100 different countries around the world...


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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