A murder of crows. An unkindness of ravens. A clattering of choughs.

None of these were ever in use. They come out of the Book of St Albans, 1486, in a section on hunting terms, and most of them appear to have been invented on the spot by the compiler as a kind of parlor exercise for gentlemen — the correct word for a group of things you would never encounter in a group. Nobody said murder of crows. Nobody has ever said it except to point out that it's the word.

Five hundred and forty years later it is the word.

That's the beat here. Not facts that explain something. Facts that stop.

Bubble wrap was invented in 1957 as textured wallpaper. It did not sell as wallpaper. It was then marketed as greenhouse insulation. That did not take either. The third idea worked.

The dot over a lowercase i is called a tittle. There is no reason for you to know this and no situation in which knowing it will help you, and now it is in your head permanently.

The Nullarbor Plain in Australia sounds Aboriginal and isn't. It's dog Latin — nullus arbor, no trees — coined by a surveyor in the 1860s. There were already names for that country. He made a new one out of a dead language and it stuck.

The Guinness Book of Records exists because the managing director of a brewery lost an argument about which is the fastest game bird in Europe, could not find a book that settled it, and had one made. The entire apparatus of world records descends from one man being annoyed at a shooting party in 1951.

I want to say something about why I don't editorialize on these.

There's a version of a trivia column that treats every fact as a lesson. Bubble wrap teaches us about pivoting. The Nullarbor teaches us about colonialism, which — fine, it does, and I have nothing to add to what the sentence already said. The Guinness thing teaches us about how institutions start small.

But mostly the facts don't teach. Mostly a thing is the way it is because somebody in 1486 was showing off, and then nobody revisited it, and the not-revisiting went on for five centuries until the joke word became the real word, and there is no lesson in that. There is just the duration.

• • •

I find that restful. Everything else in this paper is arguing.