Nevermind…doesn’t really fit here. My fault.
I have a pretty good vocabulary. I SUCK at Scrabble. It bugs me to no end. My mind just does not work that way for some reason. I suck at jumbles too.
She has 111,700. So, room for compromise.
But I’ve never needed to use any of those things since my last undergrad exam. Why should you pity me for not carrying them about in my memory?
Because I find these things intellectually stimulating, and would certainly miss them in myself if I’d lost them. I pity the illiterate as well, not as some moral failing on their part, but because they can’t enjoy books. Same with innumeracy and… whatever the word is for a lack of basic scientific knowledge.
Baseball statistics. Any time someone starts talking about batting averages or RBIs or anything else with an acronym, my eyes glaze over and I start wondering where the exits are. I understand baseball just fine, and I can follow a game if it happens to be on TV, but start bringing math into it and I’m gone.
I love all types of trivia! In bits and bobs. When I played pub trivia regularly I loved it when my teammates were able to use their specific knowledge.
I’m pretty good at most trivia subjects. Maybe television would be my best. I used to read a TV encyclopedia for fun, before the Internet. I also pored over a book of Billboard hits.
I do NOT enjoy listening to people drone on about any topic. My partner and his brother are sound technicians and holy crap is that boring. But on occasion it’s fun to ask “how did that sound happen?” I just gotta know when to make them stop.
90% of sports trivia isn’t trivia at all. Endless arcane statistics are minutiae, at best. True sports trivia is stuff like, “who was the first major league umpire to wear glasses while officiating?”
*Frank Umont
I mentioned the same to a friend and he noted that baseball stats is the fun part of the game for a lot of people.
It’s not for me either but, while someone mentioning the RBI of Joe Schmo is not for me I do like hearing people who are into it talk about it. Having a passion is good and it is fun to hear people talk about it. (at least for me)
The only really interesting tidbit of baseball trivia I know is about the longest professional game in history - Rochester at Pawtucket in 1981, which, due to the umpire having an out-of-date copy of the rulebook, went for 32 innings, having been tied at 2-2 since the 21nd, before the league president was contacted by phone and ordered play suspended at 4:07 AM, by which time the audience of 1,740 had dwindled to 19. The game was resumed two months later, with Pawtucket scoring the winning run in the 33rd inning.
Also, my dad’s cousin was the first openly gay umpire in MLB, if that counts for anything. I remember when his book came out and my dad bought a copy because he wanted to find out if he was mentioned in it because when he was a kid he bullied said cousin for being gay. My dad wasn’t really a good person.
This is me too. I find that people that are really enthusiastic about something that I know little about are usually interesting to talk to. That is why I will happily go along to just about anything to support a friend’s interest. Well, once at least.
So I don’t really disdain anyone else’s fund of apparently useless ephemera. A departed friend of mine used to be able to throw huge chunks of Shakespeare, and other poets, into conversations where appropriate. That always impressed me.
I used to be pretty good at the generic version of Trivial Pursuit (except for Sports, but even there I could sometimes make an educated guess). I used to have what I called flypaper mind, that retained a lot of useless facts, by nature trivial, that it had come across. I haven’t tried the game for a while, but these days my synapses aren’t snapping like they used to.
The specific field about which I know more than the average person is vintage fountain pens, and I do know a fair amount about them. But I can find lots of people who know more any day of the week at the message board on that topic that I frequent, and at my local pen club. I imagine lots of folks would consider that a fairly trivial area to nerd out about, and I don’t mind that they do. They’re probably right.
“Disdain” isn’t something I’ve ever felt for someone’s trivia knowledge. Disinterest fairly often, and occasionally annoyance with their behavior when they go on about some fanfic not complying with every detail of the Lore (after all, having different take on things is often the point of a fanfic). But not disdain.
I will not judge someone for being passionate about something. I might judge the thing they’re passionate about, but that’s my own ignorance creeping in.
I’ve just learned there are pen clubs!
And that’s kind of cool! I don’t get it, but I’m going to enjoy you telling me all about it anyway.
Sports trivia less so, I’m not really a sports fan so much.
I wouldn’t consider myself super expert in any one area of trivia, but more an intermediate expert in many. Mostly real life subjects, particularly the sciences - including social science - but also history and geography, and to a lesser extent politics. It’s common for me to see a particular subject mentioned, get interested in it, and research it before moving on to another, and I have an excellent memory for semi-pointless trivia (though sadly not for useful things like names, faces, and when I need to attend an appointment).
I can respect knowledge of sports trivia, but it bores me. Sci-fi, comic books, and entertainment in general are things I’m somewhat interested in - I wish they interested me more, actually, since they are easy things to talk about and common shared interests.
Like some others have said, I enjoy listening to people who are keen on a topic, as long as it’s something in which I can summon at least a little interest. I guess I might look down on the person obsessed with minutiae of a soap opera, or with celebrity gossip (I shouldn’t, but…) or on people who have extremely limited interests like bus timetables.
I wouldn’t say “respect” or “disdain”. For me the subjects would fall into one of three categories - “interesting”, “neutral” or “dull”. Most sports are neutral to dull. Any science or tech would be interesting. Some topics I would have a meta-interest in. Such as why people find fountain pens interesting for example.
I do like a pub quiz. My local pub does an old-school pen & paper quiz once a month. Where my girlfriend lives they use Speed Quizzing which is fast and eliminates cheating.
I tend to agree with the folk who find “real life” minutiae - science, history - more interesting than fictional/recreational - scifi, TV/film, sports. I guess I’m snobbish enough to somehow think the trivia I consider “real” is more important and meaningful, and therefore, more worth knowing.
I have often been described as that pond that is miles across but inches deep. I know a little bit about a lot of things, but not a lot about much of anything. I recall being recruited for a trivia team in college, and being humbled at the depths of other competitors’ knowledge.
The Onion did it!
Well said.