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--- Trivia is quite literally the crossroads (from the Latin tri—meaning three—and via—meaning road). At the outskirts of ancient Rome, booths were set up where roads crossed. Travelers could pick up information concerning destinations: trade customs, available goods, currency exchange. My daily commute took me fifteen minutes southwest on I-15, toward the Oquirrh Mountains and the squat steel-framed depository that houses DDS. My "office" was a cubicle the size of a bathroom stall, its walls peppered with Post-it Notes left by the previous tenant, an obviously dyspeptic former employee. On one yellow scrap fastened to the cabinet above the computer screen he’d scrawled the cryptic note—perhaps a memo to himself: Kill Loraine Nelson. --- "Travel" is a specialized mutation of travail, which originally meant suffering or painful effort. "Commute," on the other hand, comes from the Latin commuta—from com, meaning altogether, and mutare, meaning mutate. I travel. Language commutes. |