I was on another thread and got deep into learning about the history of certain words and thought I’d post here. What word history origins / facts do you know?
I’ll start with two that I recently came across:
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“‘Wer’ (meaning ‘man’) came from Old High German with the Anglo Saxons 1,500 years ago, and was part of Old English. It then became ‘were’ in Middle English and remains as part of werewolf (‘man wolf’) in modern English.” (Source: [email protected])
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“Sculptors in antique Rome could fix mistakes they made by mixing marble dust with wax. If a sculptor was especially gifted and made no mistakes that needed fixing, they would market their art as “sin cera”, which means “without wax”, which is where the word “sincere” comes from.” (Source: [email protected])
The word trivia comes from Latin. In Roman times people would place signs with interesting tidbits about their nearby town where roads meet as a way of luring travellers to their town. Tri means three and via is road. So trivia are useless and entertaing facts originally found at the confluence of three roads.
Harper agrees with your etymology but has a more mundane (and in my view, more likely) explanation of why “three ways” came to mean “something simple or ordinary”:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/trivial