As laudable as is its academic value, the most captivating facet of "Tooth and Nail" is the mesmerizing mystery woven amongst the vocabulary and Shakespearian triviata. Assassination, conflagration, laceration, prevarication and all the necessary elements of a titillating and provocative murder mystery are present in plentiful doses.
—Keri Blakinger, "A little SAT preparation between the bindings," Intelligencer Journal (Lancaster, PA), July 14, 2001
—Jerry Berger, "'Wacker rammers' on city's wish list," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 28, 1989
Over the next 10 years or so, it showed up in the media various times as a misspelling of Giuseppe Verdi's opera La Traviata. In July 1985, The New York Times reported on a theater troupe performing a "10-minute travesty" of La Traviata that was called Triviata.
In 1989, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper began a semi-regular feature titled "La Triviata," which offered up a few bits of trivia. (The paper still runs the "La Triviata" feature, as does the Los Angeles Times, only theirs is called "L.A. Triviata.") Shortly after that, the same newspaper used triviata alone (see the earliest citation, below) and the word's career has been a success ever since.
