Any ideas?

[anthraxia]

I dislike the concept of 'trivia' when it comes to knowledge. As far as I am concerned, no knowledge is trivial, it just depends on the context; knowing a pound cake is called a pound cake because it contains a pound of every ingredient is trivial while you are eating it, but vital while you are cooking it

Comments

[reverancepavane]

I would advise against using spermologist, since the only link to "trivia" is via the OED, where spermology is "an instance of babbling or trifling talk."
The reason I mention this is that it has gained a certain degree of notoriety in popular usage through the game Trivial Pursuit, which answers "What does a spermologist collect?" with "Trivia" (rather than the correct answer of "Seeds").

[reverancepavane]

Incidentally, I believe it was Martianus Capella who defined trivia (or more correctly one of the trivium) as one of the three basic liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. As opposed to higher education contained in the the quadrivium of geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy. This set the foundation of medieval scholarship until the Renaissance at very least.
Thus trivia came to refer to that knowledge which was of particular importance to an undergraduate.
It's confusion with the idea of "trifles" (as in knowledge of slight significance), is a late 20th Century product of those vulgar Americans who had forgotten how to speak proper English and failed in their own quest for trivia.

[anthraxia]

Interesting, but I'll point out that Shakespeare uses the term 'trivial' to mean something essentially worthless or useless, which is my beef with the term; no information is 'trivial', it just requires the right context.

[reverancepavane]

Do you have source for this unconsidered trifle?
{I should point out that it's use always had the innate implication that it was only of use to undergraduates. Not that one would ever expect a graduate to be condescending. ]
Why do I have this sudden desire for English gelatine-based desserts?

[reverancepavane]

Well a speaker on a subject would use the suffix of -logist prefixed by the subject, so Gnosiologist would be the correct term for a speaker of knowledge, or more accurately in this modern age, one who studies knowledge (since this presumes, often mistakenly, that in order to speak authoritatively on a subject one must have first studied it).
Although you are correct that a pure collector of knowledge (with no desire to use it) would use the philo root [love as acquisition – how trite], either as a -philist or philo-. Although I'd suggest Gnosisophilist or Gnosisophile would be a more correct appelation than Philognosist, but any of these would be technically correct. A philospher on the other hand is a collector of intelligent beings, not knowledge, which is a scary thought in it's own right. Although this is later confused by the application of gnosis in medieval thought to apply to self-knowledge.
I shall stop now before this becomes an exercise in parisology, leptology, and psilogy.

[quiltingdragon]

Ok, this one is worth the price of a call to my college languages prof. I'll see what she says on Monday.She's the one who got me into collecting unusual words. My current favorite is "pradakshina."

[blackdiamond06]

Renaissance woman.