Triviality

TODAY’S offering concerns the commotion caused by that level 3 history exam question last year: ‘‘Julius Caesar said, ‘Events of importance are the result of trivial causes’.’’ Many candidates didn’t know the word

trivial = ‘‘slight’’, ‘‘insignificant’’. And officialdom conceded the point. Many adults were dismayed at their not knowing.

Outrage

Sue Wootton in Corpus wrote: ‘‘I’m not sure which part of this story breaks my heart more: the fact that many young people are so linguistically impoverished that they don’t know what trivial means; the fact that faced with this mystery they have such poor resources for working out the meaning through context; or the fact that the official response was to agree with the students’’. To say, as the spokesman did, that the exam was testing history not comprehension added fuel to the flames.

Languagechange

In the WordWays postbag, by contrast, Lynne Hill wrote: ‘‘Is the problem languagechange? Many adults have taken the view that everyone knows about

Trivial Pursuit. However, the game was at the height of its popularity in 1984, 20 years before the present students were born. They probably don’t know the game and, without having played it, have no understanding of the adjective. Words do go out of use, especially among teenagers, and may change their meaning completely. The changes in word meanings like gay are the most obvious.’’

Originally

Originally, in its Latin, a

trivium was a meeting of tres viae, three roads. In medieval Latin the adjective trivialis came to mean ‘‘at a crossroads’’, where people meet and talk, hence ‘‘commonplace, vulgar, unimportant’’. But then after

Trivial Pursuit — the game which might have enhanced the awareness of ‘‘trivial’’ — successive generations have instead ditched the game and not met the adjective. Caesar said

What did Caesar say, in full

(Civil Wars III. 68)? Sed fortuna, quae plurimum potest cum in reliquis rebus tum praecipue in bello, parvis momentis magnas rerum commutationes efficit: ‘‘But fortune, that has huge power, as in everything else so especially in war, brings about great changes through small turningpoints, momentis’’. A

momentum is that which moves things, tips the balance. Wars may break out through some small trigger, but usually also because of deeper underlying causes. The Latin hinges on the very simple ironical contrast between parvis and magnas,

‘‘small’’ v ‘‘great’’ — in war. That exam question has come quite a way from Caesar’s meaning, perhaps by way of truncation, extension, or dilution in Net Quotes. Sad if so.

Choice

Since the level 3s had no choice of question, their only choice was how to interpret and adapt the wording to the material they may well have had ready. For university exams, I was advised to write what I took a question to mean and to think about it accordingly, and of course about evidence pointing either way. Selfconsistency and reasoned advocacy are worth something in these situations.

Plague in Athens

At university again, the story circulated of someone who, after inadequate reading of the Greek of Thucydides vivid narrative of the plague in wartime Athens in 429BC, guessed that an exam passage which described people eating acorns and crawling on all fours, was not the effects of plague but described the simple life of the Golden Age. He translated in this light, and got quite a good mark, for following out his hunch with vigour. Like a lawyer who gets credit for arguing a bad case well.

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