Writing for Vulture, "the first in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop's recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future," The Roots' Questlove uses trivial in such a knowledgeable and cool way we had to offer up a shout-out.
He begins his essay introducing three ideas, pulled from 16th-century Massachusetts governor John Bradford, Albert Einstein, and Ice Cube, writing:
Those three ideas, Bradford’s and Einstein’s and Cube’s, define the three sides of a triangle, and I’m standing in it with pieces of each man: Bradford’s rueful contemplation, Einstein’s hair, Ice Cube’s desires. Can the three roads meet without being trivial? This essay, and the ones that follow it, will attempt to find out.
Trivial means, of course, "inconsequential." And that is what Questlove means as well. But to Latin lovers the word will resonate in a slightly deeper way. In Latin, tri means "three" and a trivium refers to a place where three roads meet, a crossroads, which in many cases becomes a public place, a place that is open to everyone and thus, ordinary.
How did "ordinary" morph into "inconsequential"? Check out trivial's blurb in the Vocabulary.com Dictionary to see why, or go deeper with a discursive explanation of trivia in The Online Etymology Dictionary, which includes the story of a book of trivia, or commonplace bits of information, published in 1902, the development of an informal trivia game on college campuses in the 1960s, and the 1982 release of the board game Trivial Pursuit.
Knowing all of this, we can return to Questlove, fully appreciative of the fun he's having with trivial's backstory and the way it lines up, serendipitous celestial phenomenon-style, with the three-ideas-coming-together concept he describes.
What's even cooler? He doesn't explain this, just lays it down for anyone who gets it to enjoy. It's an argument for 1) reading more Questlove, and 2) learning more about how words like trivial work in multitudinous ways.
