Special Guest Wednesday

This week, I'm delighted to have the red-headed quizmistress, Logo as my special guest. Logo was asked to define Trivia.

Trivia is the name of the Roman goddess who is the equivelent of Hecate, the Greek goddess of witchcraft, crossroads, and the harvest moon. She was an underworld titan-goddess, and a good friend of Ceres/Demeter. According to myth, Trivia even helped her find her daughter Proserpine/Persephone.
An early variation of the word and its use dates to early Latin: tri- (3) + -vium, deriv. of via way, road. Trivium- "the meeting place of three roads."
In Medieval times the lower division of the seven liberal arts was called the Trivium and consisting of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The remaining four, the quadrivium, were arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Trivial in this sense would have meant "of interest only to an undergraduate."
The first known usage of the word "trivial" in Modern English is from 1589; it was used in the sense: "of little importance or significance." Thus the word trivia came to be applied to unimportant, inconsequential, or nonessential items, especially of information. In the late 20th century the expression came to mean the kind information useful almost exclusively for answering quiz questions.


TRIVIA, n. 1. Confections of content for those who find the demands of substance distasteful
2. A litmus test for literary tendency.

About Logo: Logophile, the word lover, has two children each named Thing. Although a married stay-at-home mother, careful research into her past has, over the past year, turned up reasons to question the wholesome image that presents. Unsavory relatives, foreign entanglements, grasping material ambitions and the company of thieves, charlatans and disreputable miscellaneous scoundrels paints a different picture of Ms. "I love poetry and drive a mini-van." Wholesome, indeed. I told you she was a redhead.

In spite of the sociopathy hidden just beneath the surface, Logo writes a blog which is one of very few balancing poetry, anecdote and interaction with her audience. Most Fridays she publishes flash fiction of the 55-word variety and during the week she often adds poetry either her own, which is excellent, or favorites by poets who are revered in more sophisticated and proper circles. Mondays tend to be times of sharing the adventures that Logo and her immediate family seem to find themselves in often enough for weekly tattling. Her Tuesday trivia quiz is a favorite pastime for all her readers and the quizes are challenging and fun.

Logo and her dog were guests here about a year back and Logo herself played a street preacher in this story. Thank you, Logo, for being an excellent guest here and taking in as friends those of us less correct than yourself.

How to be a guest on this site: To be anointed, I will need your email address and permission. So, were you to send an email to dpascover at mac dot com and say in the subject line something like "OK, ok I'll do it," that would definitely work unless I thought it was spam and deleted it. On an upcoming Wednesday, after posting that week's guest I would then send you an email with a word not in The Devil's Dictionary which you could then spend the next three days writing a definition for and return to me with a graphic or two of your choosing. The only rules are no profanity, no novels and anything else I make up. If you've done this before, I may ask you again if you're around a lot. If you've done this before and not been heard from since, just let me know that you want to be a guest and then disappear again.