It is often humiliating to know things. There is only so much room in a brain for facts, and it’s easy to worry that the ones you have stored might be the wrong ones, that there’s something more practical or intellectually weighty that you ought to be stashing away instead. Why, for instance, do I know the names of the guitar players in Train and Matchbox Twenty, while no amount of mnemonics can make the distinctive appearance of poison ivy stick in my memory? Toward the end of the 1960s, at the dawn of the information age, one of the most common names for the useless knowledge we absorb and often unwillingly retain every day became “trivia.” The word wears a sheepish grin: It knows that the knowledge it names is, well, trivial. With its arch plural, “trivia” invites you to think of facts as shiny little baubles to collect.

In recent years, “trivia” has acquired a surprising challenger: “lore.” The particulars of the John F. Kennedy assassination have been described online as “J.F.K. lore.” The tragic origin story of Chuck E. Cheese, whose full middle name really is Entertainment and who grew up in St. Marinara’s Orphanage? That’s the “disturbing lore” behind the animatronic mouse. One Threads user wondered if there was “any good lore” about the Dave Matthews Band — and there is, such as, for example, the time its tour bus dumped some 800 pounds of human excrement into the Chicago River.

Where “trivia” was self-effacing, “lore” is epic, or at least mock-epic. It gives minor factoids the feeling of magical incantations, perhaps read off forbidden scrolls from a sorcerer’s library. Fittingly, “lore” is a very old word. It shares a Germanic root with “learn.” In Old English, lore was knowledge, anything that was taught or learned — facts, morals, doctrine. Early modern English retained this meaning. In “Paradise Lost,” lore is, among other things, the reasoned voice of good sense, tragically unheeded: after Milton’s Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, “Understanding rul’d not, and the Will / Heard not her lore.” Still, at the threshold of modernity, the word started to acquire an archaic mouthfeel. It became a word more suitable for talking about bygone days: “Grecian” or “Roman lore”; the “legendary lore” of the remote past. Faintly, almost imperceptibly, lore began to flicker somewhere between hard fact and mythic tale.

By the 1970s, fans of all things swords and sorcery had picked up on this faint air of the fantastical. Early editions of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons handbooks sketch a magical world that features “tomes of arcane lore” and legendary relics surrounded by a tissue of “rumors, tales and other lore.” Over the following decades, lore became a more capacious category, encompassing not just specific rumors and tales within a fantasy world but also the world’s whole constitutive mythology and history. “The fans demand lore,” wrote the author Cory Doctorow in 2024. That is, fans have come to expect back stories and explanations for every element of a story. And they will go to great lengths to find them.