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The human love of trivia is partially a response to the requirement that we retain certain specialist knowledge. Most jobs force you to learn and maintain the information required to do certain tasks. Often after spending four or six years studying it. So our brains just like learning something for the sake of learning, with no professional or economic pressure attached. Knowing the precise height of the Eiffel Tower (1083 feet or 330 meters at the tip) is pretty unimportant unless you are a Parisian tour guide, but that frees us to not stress about it.
More often than not, trivia knowledge is attached to a topic we are actually interested in, be it a film series, architecture, the history of ancient China, or baking techniques. Or maybe all of them. There is something comforting about just having some bits or pieces of random data about our world to whip out at a moment's notice. Perhaps we like to imagine a scenario where these facts will suddenly become useful, helping us save the world through the knowledge, that, for example, the Vatican is the smallest country in the world.
#4
The actual act of knowing a piece of trivia at the right moment actually releases a burst of dopamine similar to what we experience when playing a video game we enjoy. Simply put, knowing something relatively obscure makes one feel special and there is the added bonus of being helpful in some situations. Trivia knowledge makes you feel like an expert on some obscure subject, which can feel romantic in a way. You might imagine people wondering just how did you learn the Latin origin of ‘library,’ for example.
#8
It’s important not to mix up knowledge of a lot of trivia for real intelligence. Not to say that trivia knowledge is bad in any way, but there is no actual correlation between education levels, general intellect, and enjoyment of trivia. Some people just have the capacity to absorb large amounts of unrelated data. This ability is pretty useful in a lot of professions, as any medical student can attest, but it’s not a requirement to have good problem-solving skills.
To add some trivia to trivia, most people can probably connect the shared roots of trivial to the word trivia. Counterintuitively, the origin of trivial is the Latin triviālis, meaning common or vulgar. It’s perhaps a sign of how much information we have available to us, that trivia now is normally less common information. Instead, the emphasis is more on the idea that this information isn’t, in the grand scheme of things, that important. If you want an alternative to this word, consider the slightly more pejorative factoid or, to sound more exotic, factlet, which is so uncommon most spellchecks register it as a mistake. It is not a mistake.
#15
A factlet tends to indicate something that is often quoted but is false or misleading. For example, some people still claim that Santa Clause was invented to sell Coca-Cola. Now, the soft drink companies Christmas ads are still pretty well known, but originally, they were just drawing from a general folklore character that exists in a number of cultures, be it, Saint Nicolas or Ded Moroz. Similarly, Pepsi did not at one point have the world’s sixth-largest navy, though such an acquisition would probably allow them to run Coca-Cola out of business.
#19
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