I think there’s a general impression that Trivia People are not always Big-Picture People–that is, that knowing all the 2-letter words in Scrabble or the names of all the Bad News Bears doesn’t necessarily correlate with more meaningful measures of intelligence. I go into this a bit in Brainiac. (Whose cover you may have noticed is now splashed all over the site. It’s hard out here for a pimp.)

We had our friends Nephi and Gina (or, as I like to call them, Gφ) staying with us over the weekend. For some reason, we were talking about books we remembered from the Scholastic book fairs of our childhood, and Nephi mentioned James Marshall’s hippo protagonists George and Martha.

“I always had a theory that they were named after George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” I said, feeling very clever indeed.

Nephi looked at me sort of funny. “Oh, I always assumed they were named after our first President and his wife.”

Long silence. Somehow it had never occurred to me that the James Marshall hippos and the Edward Albee boozers were both named after, oh, just the most famous married couple in American history. Something that many five-year-old George and Martha readers probably grasp immediately.

So chalk one up for the Cliff Clavin side of the “trivia acumen vs. intelligence” argument. (I also thought the expression “You’ve got another think coming” was “You’ve got another thing coming” until just a couple years ago, but maybe I should save that for another post.)