Glamorous Trivia: The Endnotes

Some more educational etymologies and information about the trivium and quadrivium.

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Welcome to the Endnotes, where I put all the fun facts I can’t fit into the main videos! Today, some extra bits of information from my video about the word Education — and if you haven’t seen that yet, click on the card.

Of course there has always been education in the form of apprenticeship, learning a vocational skill by training with someone already doing the job. Apprentice, by the way, related to apprehend, comes from the Latin verb apprehendere made up of the two prefixes ad- meaning “to” and pre- meaning “before”, plus a root which goes back to the Proto-Indo-European *ghend- meaning “seize, take”, also giving the word get. So literally an apprentice is someone who grabs hold of something and thus learns it. But formal education is in many ways linked with literacy. In the early ancient world in places such as Mesopotamia and Egypt, the writing systems such as cuneiform and hieroglyphics were complicated and took many years to master, so education in reading and writing was mainly restricted to the class of professional scribes. But as easier to learn writing systems were developed, in particular alphabetic writing systems as in Greece (derived from Phoenician writing), education too became more broadly accessible. And with the Latin alphabet in turn derived from the Greek alphabet, this focus on literacy as the basis of education continued throughout European and western history.

In the middle ages, the three subjects of the trivium (from which we get the words trivia and trivial) were the basics of reading and writing and were all focused on the word and language. The four subjects of the quadrivium, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, are the sciences or mathematical subjects, if we consider music as the science or calculation of musical harmony. But if we think about those three subjects of the trivium, they all reflect the idea of the written or spoken word. The first, grammar, comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *gerbh- meaning “to scratch”, and in fact also gives us the word carve as well as graph, the idea being that letters were originally carved. From the word grammar we also get the word glamour which originally implied magic from the notion of arcane learning. Glamour then gains its modern sense from the idea that someone who is glamorous kind of casts a spell on people. The word spell too has both magical and wordy senses: to cast a spell and to spell a word. The word spell goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root which means “to say aloud or recite”. Getting back to the subjects of the trivium, logic, also often referred to as dialectic, comes from the Greek word logos meaning “word”. This in turn goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *leg- meaning “collect” but with many derivatives with the meaning “to speak” from the notion of gathering or picking out ones words. And as it turns out, this root also gives us that other word dialectic from Greek dia- plus legein, literally “to speak across or between”. And the final subject of the trivium rhetoric comes from the Indo-European root *werə- meaning “to speak” from which we also get the word word. So the basics of medieval education are all about the written word, reflecting the importance in the middle ages of the Bible and its textual transmission.

As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating people, on the Endless Knot Podcast, available on all the major podcast platforms as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching!