Trivialising vocabulary

A teacher provides a defence of not expecting kids to know the word trivial, and not using hard words like trivial on NCEA exams. 

And yet the incidence of an apparently innocuous word causing such consternation amongst exam candidates speaks to a number of interesting issues. The first is how quickly language changes, and how difficult it is to pick up these changes when they are intergenerational. The people setting the exam have no doubt been surprised that the word ‘trivial’ is not widely recognised by the young. So was I. I had no idea it had slipped out of common usage. But then I teach mathematics and have an interest in philosophy and trivial has an important meaning in both those fields. Even if I didn’t, I grew up in a world where the word was often used. I also grew up in the countryside and so as a child knew the difference between a cow, a heifer and a steer. None of these things speak to the general state of my vocabulary, just the context in which it was acquired.

Speaking to a history teacher following the exam, I was interested to hear that the problem with ‘trivial’ was not confined to struggling students, but affected candidates of all abilities. Top students were caught out because the examiners did not realise a word was no longer widely understood. Students were able to make guesses based on the usages they were familiar with, specifically trivia quizzes of various kinds. So some students assumed that trivial meant highly detailed and specific. And fair enough too – the questions in Trivial Pursuit are rarely trivial in the way implied by the quote in the exam. So it might be less a case that students don’t know what trivial means, and more a case that the meaning of the word trivial is changing.

I hadn't known that trivial had fallen out of common usage. If it has, it's been in the last decade. Google ngrams run through 2008. The decline in word usage since the 70s has looked fairly trivial.


A sympathetic and compassionate future policy would restrict all NCEA exams, including those for final-year students in history, to use only words that show up on the list of the 3000 most common words in the English language.

Scripts using words beyond the ones on that list should be downgraded. Not only does the use of bigger words make those of more limited vocabulary feel bad, but we should also expect that, when NCEA achieves everything it is destined to achieve, the graders themselves will only know 3000 words.

Getting down to the list of 3000 may take some time. But the Eleventh Edition NCEA Dictionary will finally have whipped the language into its final shape - the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. It will have cut the language down to the bone. There is great wastage in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. If you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them?