#TRIVIA
I love the word ‘trivia’. We use it today to mean something unimportant, common place but if we look into its history we find associations that are in no way ‘trivial’. The word is the plural of the Latin word trivium meaning a place where three roads meet, a crossroad. Trivia was the name the Romans gave to the Greek goddess of magic and spells,Hecate, who was honoured by pillars raised at crossroads and outside domestic doorways, symbolically representing Hecate/Trivia’s ability to move between the world above and the world below.
Hecate, sometimes spelt with a K, was the Greek goddess of magic and spells ,the moon and night, ghosts and necromancy. We must remember that what the monotheists call ‘magic’ was, more often herbalism and healing to the pagan. Today, with the emergence of Wicca, Hecate is best known as the queen of the witches and although she began in Asia Minor as a beautiful young goddess, these days she tends to be depicted as a crone, specifically the third face of the Triple Goddess who represents a woman’s life cycle of Daughter, Mother, Crone.
But deity was not the only manifestation of trivia. In Classical education, the first three disciplines of the original seven liberal arts, Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric (the other four being arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy), were known as the trivium. The same epithet can be used to describe any three-step system such as Knowledge, Understanding and Wisdom or, for the technological era — Input, Processing and Output. I was lucky enough to enjoy a good old-fashioned grammar school education. We read, we thought, we wrote/spoke/acted. Sadly, as far as I can tell, current education consists of sound bites and multiple choice questions. No-one seems to want to develop critical thinking in our children.
Indeed, the word today is best known in such games as Trivial Pursuits or trivia quizzes but as any ageing female sleuth knows, the littlest details can bust a case wide open; Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple is the iconic representation of such a sleuth. And it is definitely true that great disasters can be caused by seemingly trivial errors. Some say the Titanic sank because it had ‘weak rivets’; the Apollo 1 tragedy was reportedly caused by ‘damaged wires’. Whatever the truth, even nursery rhymes teach us how important it is to always check and recheck the seeming minutiae of life.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
Don’t underestimate trivia. One day something trivial may save your life. And remember - the devil is in the details!
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