Trivia Day

What the day is

Trivia Day is observed on January 4. It is credited to Robert L. Birch of the Puns Corps, who intended it to mark the part small facts play in curiosity.

Origin and background

The word has a better history than its meaning suggests. Trivia comes from the Latin for three roads, describing the junction where three ways met. A crossroads is a public place where anyone might be, so what was spoken there was common, and common drifted into commonplace, and commonplace into unimportant. The medieval trivium, the three foundational liberal arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric, comes from the same root and once described the opposite of unimportant.

The modern quiz sense is recent. It was popularized in the 1960s by two Columbia University students who ran contests on the minutiae of popular culture and published a book of questions, which fixed the word in its current use. Trivial Pursuit followed in 1979, invented by two Canadian journalists who found pieces missing from a board game and decided to make their own, and became one of the largest selling games of the following decade.

What makes trivia compelling is well described by the information gap account of curiosity. Curiosity is not strongest when you know nothing about a subject; it peaks when you know almost enough, and the gap between what you have and what you need is small enough to feel closeable. This is why a question you nearly know is unbearable and a question you have no purchase on at all is merely dull.

The same mechanism produces the tip of the tongue state, where you can retrieve facts about a word, its length or first letter, without retrieving the word itself. It is evidence that memory stores rather more than it can hand over on demand.

How to take part

• Go to a pub quiz, which is the form the whole thing survives in.
• Do not look up the answer immediately. The struggle is what fixes it in memory.
• Ask people what they know a surprising amount about. Everyone has something.
• Write five questions on something you know well and try them on somebody.
• Notice which facts you nearly know. That gap is doing the work.