I enjoy reading about word origins, especially how words evolved to mean something very different from what they originally meant. While I get very annoyed as I’m living through the evolution of language, and many of my pet peeves have to do with people using words to mean something other than what they originally meant (or what they meant when I first leaned their meanings), I’m fascinated about historical word evolution.

For example— 

In the Middle Ages in Europe in addition to biblical studies education consisted of the seven liberal arts, artes liberales, which are: grammatica, rhetorica, dialectica, arithmetica, musica, geometria, astronomia, or grammar, rhetoric, dialectics (also known as logic), arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. 

Surprisingly even the most pious people had to learn more than just their Bible stuff.

Of those seven, the most important were the first three as they were of the most practical use. The were called the trivium, or “the three ways”. (Think of “tri” meaning three and surely you’ve heard of “Via Appia”, the Appian Way.) Along with religion (of course) they were the only ones taught in elementary schools.

In Sweden that led to the lowest level of schooling being called “trivial school”, just as in English some schools came to be called Grammar Schools because they taught (Latin) grammar, while in English the adjective trivial has come to mean “minor, unimportant” because it originally referred to things taught at the beginning of the school curriculum. 

—A Natural History of Latin by Tore Janson