And only man is vile, take 2

Last week's Science in Action had a short piece about a plastic-eating caterpillar (following another piece about plastic pollution of the sea – which explains the wording at the beginning of the Science in Action blurb):

It seems to me that this is BIG NEWS. As Silver Bullets go, this is pretty silvern (which, incidentally, isn't a typo, though heaven knows you might be forgiven for expecting one given my past performance: think of Golden: it's an adjective). But why has nobody made more of this?

The Science in Action website, which purportedly brings you all the week's science news  claims that a researcher at the University of Cantabria "has identified enzymes responsible for munching [sic – I don't think the enzymes do that; but still, that's not the point...] through resilient polymers..." This suggests a new discovery has been made.

But more than five years ago I reported  (here) on a not dissimilar piece of research:

<pre-script>

...a piece in the University of Cambridge's Research review.

This very hungry caterpillar produces "something that breaks the chemical bond, perhaps in its salivary glands or a symbiotic bacteria in its gut", says Paulo Bombelli, a Cambridge researcher and co-author of the article.

...the degradation rate is extremely fast compared to other recent discoveries, such as bacteria reported last year to biodegrade some plastics at a rate of just 0.13mg a day. Polyethylene takes between 100 and 400 years to degrade in landfill sites.  "If a single enzyme is responsible for this chemical process, its reproduction on a large scale using biotechnological methods should be achievable," said Cambridge's Paolo Bombelli...

...As the molecular details of the process become known, the researchers say it could be used to devise a biotechnological solution on an industrial scale for managing polyethylene waste.

<2022-afterthought>
Oh I get it. The 2017 discovery was the basis for the discovery of the enzyme, which was previously only suspected: "something that breaks the chemical bond... If a single enzyme is responsible...". Don't mind me. Carry on please. (I'm used to forensic findings becoming available in a matter of days [if not hours if the cop has a back-story involving the researcher]. But real science progresses at a more leisurely pace.) 

<after-afterthought> 

Hang on though, the researcher interviewed in that Science in Action programme told of a discovery she had just happened to make by chance. Maybe this is a different critter after all. 

</after-afterthought> 

</2022-afterthought>

Then, in update, I added a PPPS

PPPS – Three months after this original post, Scientific American has caught up, with quotes from Spain's Institute of Biomedicine & Biotechnology of Cantabria (a happy echo of Universitas Cantabrigiensis) and the University of Tennessee.

</pre-script>

I wonder what the relationship (if any) between "the University of Cantabria" (cited in that Science in Action programme) and "Spain's Institute of Biomedicine & Biotechnology of Cantabria", which knew about this process more than five years ago. Perhaps the programme should be called Science Inaction (a title that might, unfairly in most cases, be thought to apply to all the years wasted since global warming was first detected towards the end of last century, as documented in Big Oil v. the World a mini-series which, unaccountably, I missed earlier this year).

<further-reading>
Radio 4 are reading extracts from The Climate Book this week at 09.45. I just mention it; it's not as though it mattered (NB: Irony [when you say something you don't m... Hold on, don't most people know that?]).
</further-reading>

Musical trouvailles 

I've mentioned before some of the musical associations I make. My latest is a sort of conditional ear-worm. Three examples spring to mind:

• Whenever I hear the closing bars of Mozart's clarinet concerto I think of this: 
  Here We Go Looby Loo.
• Whenever the news mentions Keir Starmer I think of this chorus from The Mikado.
• My metronome app has the down beat distinguished by a pitch a minor third higher than other beats. So I can't set it to 4:4 without thinking of the Siamese cats in The Lady and the Tramp.

The other trivium I have to report is that my electric shaver can be made to play the accompaniment to the Dr Who theme. I may post a recording (if I can get it up to performance standard).

Bye for now.

b

Bear-baiting and de-nazification

In  George Kennan's Op-Ed article in the New York Times shortly after Bill Clinton's second inauguration (25 years ago), he wrote (prophetically) that

...expanding NATO would be 'most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era;' ...[and] that such  would inflame nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion and have adverse effect on development of Russian democracy 

I first mentioned this article on 27 February, in this post, writing:

<pre-script>
His opening paragraph argues:

Later in the same article he writes:

Such a decision [expanding NATO] may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. And, last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma's ratification of the Start II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry

Nobody in their right mind... [HD October 2022: I've omitted a predictable sideswipe at the once and future King of Trumpery] ...could defend the fiendish excesses of Putin, but one couldn't say NATO  hasn't been coat-trailing for the last 30-odd years. Well, now the wounded and caged bear has lashed out, just as Kennan predicted. And the West looks on in horror mixed with shocked fascination, just as the crowds did in former times at many another bear-baiting. (In that case the smart money was on the dogs, but this time I'm not so sure....) 
</pre-script>

Two days later, according to this timeline (though other sources put it a few days earlier [to say nothing of Crimea, which brings it forward a few years]) Putin started his Special Military Operation...

<tangent>
Incidentally, Google reports for me (your mileage may vary) 

About 117,000,000 results (0.44 seconds) 

           for special military operation and peace.

You heard it here for the 17 million and oneth time, folks.

</tangent>

...which has stirred two memories in what passes in my case for a mind: 

• A BBC TV programme now available (for those who in the lottery of life have the Golden Ticket, otherwise known as a Blue UK Passport [..."without let, hindrance, or paywall"?]) on iPlayer, called The Rise of the Nazis
• A discussion on the radio (maybe on Start the Week; it'd be good to give chapter and verse) that mentioned the interesting (and disturbing) fact that political predisposition affects what you see. (Come to think of it, last week's Americast is a more likely source.)

The TV programme (a less-than-brilliant three-parter, that I'm not sure I'll stick with) showed Hitler in his bunker with less and less grasp on reality and increasingly hell-bent on vandalism for vandalism's sake, and the Nazi faithful encouraging and facilitating his excesses. This is what real Naziism looks like, and Putin seems to be in its thrall.

But why? That radio (or podcast) discussion gives a clue. It cited a peaceful demonstration (documented and filmed as peaceful), and the holders of the opposing view, shown the same footage, reported seeing broken windows and burning cars. Perhaps Putin believes his psychopathic misconceptions.

Amuse souris

I saw this recently. 

The source claimed it came from a 1920s ad. I'd prefer an actual publication date, but Tweet-consumers can't be choosers I do like "linguistry" though.

By the '50s, language learning had come on apache (excuse my spellchecker). My oldest brother, in the '50s, prepared for a trip to Spain with the help of records (perhaps an early LP, perhaps 78s in a real album) featuring an American voice that kept saying "Do not be embarrassed if you make errors." (I wonder how the user was supposed to know they had.)

Recording was the answer, and 20 years later, in a language lab on  the Sidgwick Site.... [HD: stay tuned]

That's all for today. Time for choir.

b

Update: 2022.10.16.17:30 – Added PS

PS: My "Recording was the answer" was somewhere bertween naive and over-optimistic. I've written elsewhere (not sure where) that acquiring a mother tongue involves suppressing the ability to distinguish between speech sounds that don't make a difference in that language. So the amount a learner of a second language can glean from a recording of their own voice is limited.

And that memory of the language lab at the Sidgwick site is not worth recalling (or recording).

I thought this was settled

The interminably tiresome issue of how to make "referendum" plural has reared its ugly head again, although  of late it had seemd fairly settled. Here's my 2016 view:

<pre-script source="here">
Addenda agenda corrigenda memoranda propaganda pudenda...

<inline-ps type="HD 2022"> 

All the examples might be thought  to justify an -enda ending for this plural, but they are all derived from a gerundive (an adjective – which can be pluralized) rather than from a gerund (a noun – which [vide infra] can't.)

<inline-pps> 

The nouns qualified by those adjectives are all "things/stuff/matters..." ["to be done/corrected/ remembered/propagated/ashamed of"].

</inline-pps>

<inline-ps>  

  

The time has come, unfortunately, for the pointless, annoying, never-ending discussion about the plural of THE R WORD.

Let's take as our starting point  The Speech of Cicero for Aulus Cluentius Habitus:

..[2022 précis:.in para 137 he's considering an issue on which the Senate is uncertain],
and uses the phrase "referendum ad populum"]

This referendum ad populum ["the putting of a question to the people"] was soon abridged to plain referendum; but the phrase shows that the word was, in Latin, a gerund. Now I'm not going to argue that English has to follow the rules of Latin. That ridiculous notion has long plagued studies of English. But to quote one distance learning site:

Forming the gerund: The gerund is formed much the same way... . All gerunds are considered neuter nouns and there is NO nominative case and NO plural form.

OK, there is no plural of referendum  in Latin; so how do we form it in English? There is little doubt about how plurals are formed in English. In most cases (and I wonder how to quantify that most – hmmm...

<further-musings>
This "hmm", as hmm's sometimes do, led to this post.
</further-musings> 

...) the rule is simple: add an s. Phonologically it's not quite that simple: dependent on what's being pluralized, you add either /s/ or /z/ or /i:z/ or /ɪz/. But there are quite a few exceptions: sheep/sheep, man/men, ox/oxen, basis/bases...

<pre-script>

The need to refer to referendum in the plural (the referendums-endum?)  has come to the fore of late because of Putin's shenanigans in eastern Ukraine – although in such cases the word should be something more like ForegoneConclusion-dum. And presumably the BBC's pronunciation unit (if such a thing still exists) has laid down the law: all BBC journalists (I thought until this Wednesday), and most of the people interviewed by the mainstream media (apart from a few ignorami...

<note type="for the irony-impaired">
Thie is a JOKE. It's not quite original, as I'm recycling my one contribution to the Today programme, about twenty years ago – something about "ignorami with hidden agendae".
</note>

But Razia Iqbal  (who presented The World Tonight on Wednesday) obviously didn't get the memo. So she confirmed the painful discovery I made back in 2016:

Argh indeed. Why does hypercorrectness have to  be considered "formal"? It's not formal, it's just WRONG.

Before I go, a bit of TV criticism. I've been watching the Beeb's Crossfire, but was singing during the last episode (so recorded it). I'm not sure I'll bother with it though. I mean it's quite suspenseful, and Keeley Hawes is good, but there's not much plot developmen to sustain a 3-hour mini-series. There's a love-triangle, but one corner of it died in the first hour and another corner died in  the second, leaving just our heroine running around a hotel dodging terrorists' bullets. Besides, there's no element of ctrossfire in it; there are just goodies and baddies.

Well, that's all she wrote.

b

Update: 2022.10.02.18:00 – Added <inline-ps />
Update: 2022.10.03.11:20 – Added <inline-pps />
Update: 2022.10.05.12:20 – Added PPS

PPS In my more manic moments I have floated an idea that neither would nor should fly. But it's interesting:

<reductio-ad-absurdum>
There are in principle four cases, each of which could have its own word:

• referendum (one of these things)
• referendums (two or more of these things)
• referenda (on the analogy of "agenda", a list of questions to be put to the people: to be clear, the usage would be "a referenda")
• referendas (two or more such lists)

Fortunately we don't live in a world where this could ever work.👺
</reductio-ad-absurdum>

Plus ça change...

 ...c'est la même shows.

I've said before

<pre-script post="this">
A choral singer knows he's getting on when, as for me this term, the next concert includes three choral pieces all of which he's sung before with another choir or choirs.
</pre-script>

This time, though, they were all sung by Wokingham Choral Society.  This poster gives the details:

We sang Ein Deutsches Requiem (we sang in German at the time, and we will be singing again in German, so I'm not sure why the poster gives the English) in 2011.

<tangent type="Elitist? So bite me.">
The choir had sung it previously (in English) three times, starting in 1970, and at roughly ten year intervals; so it's due for a reprise. I wonder if they sang the Novello translation, with its 'How lovely are all thy dwellings, Lord'. To me that ALL sticks out as strangely bathetic – the sort of thing you might say to an estate agent?

I know it's needed for a strict syllable-count (the original for 'are all your' is sind deine), but  what would be wrong with 'a-are'?

Fortunately (for me, at least) this time we'll be singing Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnüngen.
</tangent>

We haven't sung Brahms' Schicksalslied  in a concert, but it figures in the Past Concerts section of our website because it was programmed for a concert that was cancelled because of COVID (so we did rehearse it, on Zoom – not the whole choir, but as many as could tolerate Zoom's shortcomings).

As for the Purcell, we sang it in 2017 in an all-Purcell concert. But I had sung it before with my chapel choir in my first undergraduate year.

<autobiographical-note>
My college was, at the time (they've since seen the light) all male – the only concession to equality of the sexes was that ladies could dine at formal  hall (but only at high table, and I was present at the first occasion for that in September 1971...

<oh-yeah>
(And if any Oxbridge-savvy heckler protests that an undergraduate wouldn't have been there so early [Full Term doesn't usually start until early October], an  exception was made for people offering Modern and Medieval  Languages {don't ask😉} for Part I {I said don't ask😉}, as it was assumed that our oral proficiency would be better  after a year abroad rather than a year of lectures: so that the oral exams should happen before Full Term started.)
</oh-yeah>

...).
</autobiographical-note>

L'Envoi

Incidentally, I share Jon Sopel's bewilderment, expressed in this tweet:

I'm no republican, and in fact approve of pomp and ceremony. But in the last few days there has been a distinct lack of proportion in the public reaction to the death of a remarkable and wholly admirable lady – to whom our strangely appropriate concert will be dedicated.

b

Blowing hot and cold

 In  The Unfolding of Language.  Guy Deutscher asks "Have you ever wondered, for example, why in Italian caldo means not 'cold' but hot?" As it happens, yes. In this PP post (that's pre-pandemic – a usage I've borrowed from a recent suggestion to Newscast) I was writing about my time as an observer of language, and justified the early start in this note:

<autobiographical_note>
Really starting so young? Well yes. Before my tenth birthday, during a trip to Italy, I remember marvelling at the gratuitous mischievousness  of a language that marked a hot tap with a C.
</autobiographical_note>

Deutscher goes on to explain:

As it happens it is not the Italians who are to blame for this mismatch, but rather the English, who tum out to be of good Idlefordian stock [HD – the mythical town in Deutcher's fable is called 'Idleford']. Italian caldo and English hot both go back to similar roots that started with k- in the prehistoric ancestor language. Caldo ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European *kel 'warm', and English hot goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *kai "burn'. But whereas the forebears of the Italians didn't alter the shape of their *kel too much, the ancestors of the English happily followed good effort-saving principles. As can be seen in the diagram below, the k of *kai was weakened to ch, and then further to h.  And since in many varieties of English, the h of hot has been dropped, so that only 'ot remains, it's clear that the Idlefordian principle has been followed to completion:

Changes due to economy of effort: k -> ch -> h -> <null>

 

<commentary justification="Don't blame Deutscher">
As Google Lens (the piece of magic that lets me read text) threw its hands up at the diagram, I've had to copy it. As I understand it, the ( ) in the Proto-Germanic line show a via stage in the process (with each change marking the progress k -> ch -> h - <null> (mirroring the changes spelt out in the fable, with characters saying improbable things like:

 'Life has much improved since we started raising the tongue only half-way [HD: to produce a ch instead of a k],.... But just think about it like this: wouldn't it be even easier if we didn't bother with the tongue at all? For if instead of raising it half-way up to produce a ch, we only slightly constrained the air in what is known in my profession [HD: the speaker is a doctor] as the "glottis", just a little further down the vocal tract, we would get the sound h instead. This sound is not so very different from ch, but takes so much less energy to produce, since we don't have to go to all the effort of moving that big and heavy tongue.'  

<voice_crying_in_the_wilderness complaint="Publishers, hmphh"> 

I'm sorry about this 'ch sound' business: what's to stop the reader thinking of chat or chemise or chiropractor, or .... It's /χ/, OK? I imagine the publishers told Deutscher he couldn't use a decent transcription method, and as it was his first book he had to go along with them. And by the time he wrote his second, the pass was already sold: ironically, the principle of economy of effort took over. 

</voice_crying_in_the_wilderness>

...). The asterisk is a philological convention; it marks an unattested form. And the bold letters are simply a way of highlighting the change being discussed

</commentary> 

 

Unstressed vowels

(new header, to reset the margins, so that phone-users don't get illegible indents}

In another PP post about assassins I wrote:

<prescript>
Here , relatively early in the life of this blog, I was writing about a spiral ring found in Pompeii,  with an inscription that included the word domnus (sic, no i).

... no-one could presumably suggest that there was not room, in a 10...[HD: I over-estimated: the dedicatee, a maidservant, can't have had fingers as pudgy as I allowed for in my initial '10-15'] cm spiral ring, for one little I, or that this one-stroke character was too complex for an otherwise impeccable craftsman! No, people were dropping the unstressed I in speech; and this accounts for words like the Italian Donna and Spanish Doña when the  Latin was Domina . (I changed the sex of the lordly person, because in the masculine the attrition of an unstressed vowel has gone one step further in Spanish – Don [which dropped its unstressed vowel {HD 2019: that is, after dropping the unstressed i it dropped the unstressed u}].)

It would have been less contentious to cite the Portuguese donna, as in current Spanish the change has gone further, with the introduction of the ñ.

Anyway, the same happened to the unstressed a in cannabis (though in a different context, of course ...to produce the word "canvas" ....
</prescript>

Well, we've been netless for a few days, and I couldn't post this till now, so you're spared further thoughts for today.

b

Update: 2022.09.05.10:45 – Fixed several typos (some introduced by the aforementioned Google Lens [optical character recognition]); not so magical.

Paths of least resistance

Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass,  mentioned in several posts before, explores an extended metaphor about language development and the path of least resistance in language acquisition;  I hope to  cite it in an update, but for now you'll just have to take my word for it.

<inline_ps>
Readers of the past 500 posts on this blog may have come to the conclusion that this sort of faith is sometimes misplaced. I've had a good look, and think it must have been a different author – Steven Pinker maybe; but I've done a Prospero  on the relevant book (except that in his case Sue Ryder wasn't involved). So the source of this extended metaphor must remain a mystery.
</inline_ps> 

 <inline__pps>
Whoops – right author, wrong book (a better one, if I remember right): The Unfolding of Language. 

But I'm not sure that 'extended metaphor' does the passage justice. It is more of a fable, which seems to describe an unlikely tale called The Elders of Idleford: not so unlikely, as it turns out, since the very mechanism for language change that it describes, actually happened in English's treatment of 'hot'.  A future post will say more.
</inline_pps> 

In an early post  (nearly five years ago – a few months before the Brexit referendum, if you remember those halcyon days, when we had so much to look forward to) I discussed the way 'ain't' is so useful to learners of English as a Second Language (and to anyone acquiring the language):

<prescript> 

The fortunes of the word ain't provide a good example of the way language learners take the line of least resistance. Put yourself in the position of a European immigrant to America in the 18th or 19th century. The paradigm of the indicative of the verb be is not at all straightforward, especially in the negative:

• I am not, I'm not, [and not so long ago I amn't]
• You are not, You're not, You aren't
• He/she/it is not* (etc etc..., you get the idea)

How much easier than all these variants (with attendant phonological complications – for example, the vowel ['22 clarification: in the subject pronoun] does not  change between 'I'm not' and 'I am not', but it does change between 'You are not' and 'You're not' [but it's unchanged again in 'You aren't']) is the word ain't:

• I ain't
• You [sing.] ain't
• He/she/it ain't
• We ain't
• You [pl.] ain't
• They ain't

Language Nazis may deprecate this usage, but it certainly makes the language learner's life much simpler. 

</prescript> 

A similar (the mechanism is not the same – the motive is though) change happened with the phrase 'for aught I know'. This usage graph from the Collins online dictionary shows the decline of 'aught':

'Aught' has had mixed fortunes; it was big in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dwindled during the twentieth, and virtually disappeared in the twenty-first – living on, I suspect, among the few grey-hairs who insist on saying 'for aught I know' in preference to 'for all I know'.

<parenthesis subject="invitation to corpus gurus">
This conjecture could be tested, but I don't have the corpus nous to do it.  If you  know how, be my guest.
</parenthesis>

That phrase itself ('for aught I know' , rather than the version with 'all') is far from common: 11 is just over .01% of 817:

<apologia-pro-corpus-suo>

 

I've used COCA because the Collins online dictionary doesn't mention it in its 'British English' entries
but does under 'American English'

</apologia-pro-corpus-suo>

But that isn't the whole story. Though rarely outnumbering the 'all' version (only in the first half of the nineteenth century) , the 'aught' version was once a fairly significant competitor, as this historical query  shows:

But by the end of the century the 'all' version had a clear lead, and hasn't looked back since. Why?

There may be several reasons, but I suspect the path of least resistance in language acquisition...

<linguistese>
Excuse the $10 word. I've  inherited the linguists' opposition to the term learning for what is, outside the schoolroom, a simple process of picking up the system/rules (that's rules in the descriptive rather than prescriptive sense – the observable pattern of what's actually done, rather than a hodge-podge of prescriptions that some self-styled 'authority' lays down as a law).

</linguistese>

... had something to do with it. 

The Department of  Security's Yearbook of Immigration Statistic 2012  shows this pattern of immigration since 1820 (when 'for all I know' was unheard of): 

It's not difficult to imagine what was going on in the mind of the ESOL speaker: they hear a first-language  English speaker saying 'for aught I know'. The second syllable is a word they don't know (or think they may have misheard) starting with the vowel /ɔ:/, so when they reproduce the phrase they use the 'all' version. Contrast the upward trend in this graph with the downward trend in the usage graph for 'aught' over the same period (in a US cop show they'd superimpose them at the click of a mouse, but I shall just have to rely on good old imagination).

Right; enough wild surmise for one day.

b

Update: 2022.08.23,14:20 – Added <inline_ps /> after first para.

Update: 2022.08.24,12:05 – Added <inline_pps /> after that.

Update: 2022.08.30,17:20 – Added link to that.

Update: 2022.10.29,17:00 – Added PPPS

PPPS

I've just spotted another example of this principle. On the news a few nights ago there was an interview with an Iranian woman who referred to a /'slægɔn/; from the context she obviously meant slogan, and I dismissed it at first as a one-off slip of the tongue. But she went on to use the same slip half a dozen times (if not more).

And I think I know why. There are not many English two-syllable words that use the form "-agon". I can think off the top of my head of only three - dragon, flagon (which an ESOL learner is unlikely to have met), and wagon. But they outnumber two-syllable words that use the form "-ogan"; I can think of only one, slogan - apart from  names like Hogan, Logan, and Wogan. One could cast the net wider and admit polysyllables such as agony, but that would open the door to counter-examples such as mahogany.

<tangent>
In The Masochism Tango Tom Lehrer rhymed those two words.

Your heart is hard as stone or mahogany,
That's why I'm in such exquisite agony 

Now where was I?
</tangent>

The reason for slogan's uniqueness is that it is, of course, a borrowing; and borrowings don't follow the phonological rules of more common words. Here's what Etymonline says:

slogan (n.)

1670s, earlier slogorne (1510s), "battle cry," from Gaelic sluagh-ghairm "battle cry used by Scottish Highland or Irish clans," from sluagh "army, host, slew," from Celtic and Balto-Slavic *slough- "help, service." Second element is gairm "a cry" (see garrulous). Metaphoric sense of "distinctive word or phrase used by a political or other group" is first attested 1704.

A language-learner looks for patterns; and maybe there was an area in this Iranian speaker's brain that housed the group dragon, slagon, and wagon.

Afterthought: it's an interesting coincidence (to me, at least) that the formation of the porte-manteau word "slogan" took place on the field of battle. To most Westerners...

<inline-p⁴s> 

(that is, speakers of British English, American English, and second-language English speakers who know the word)            

</inline-p⁴s>

... I imagine, the word has more associations with advertising; its use in the Iran riots is truer to its origins.

Update: 2022.10.30.12:30 – Added <inline-p⁴s />

Do do do what you done done done before before before

... not mine, an Ogden Nash quote.

This week's You're Dead To Me dealt with the Terracotta Army protecting the tomb of China's First Emperor, of whom the National Museums Liverpool write:

A life of conquest shaped the man who would become China’s First Emperor. Born Prince Ying Zheng, he was just 13 years old when he became King of the Qin State in 246 BC. Initially supported by his mother Queen Zhao Ji and chancellor Lü Buwei who effectively managed the government, the young king took full control of his kingdom aged 22. With massive armies he overpowered the six remaining independent kingdoms of the late Warring States Period and unified China in 221 BC; putting an end to centuries of political turmoil, constant war and endless bloodshed.

Source

'Putting an end to ... bloodshed' is a matter of opinion. What he did was arrogate to himself the business of bloodshed. His mausoleum was not discovered until 1974, and the written history – including records of folk memory – does not mention the tomb with any specifics. This can only have been achieved by the deaths of all the thousands of unfortunates who toiled on that decades-long, 50 km², building site (which shows evidence of deformity [caused by hard labour] and possibly torture...

<tangent type="etymological nazi">
I admit, without pride, that when the learned guest on the podcast mentioned "leg manacles" I felt a reflex twitch on the grounds that manacles restrict the movement of manus (Latin "hands") a silly and trivial objection, I know. This blog has mentioned "The Etymological Fallacy" many times.
<tangent> 

...). The army was armed with bronze weapons, with cutting edges and  interchangeable moving parts: if the trigger on one mannequin's crossbow broke, for example, it could be replaced off-the-shelf. This was not bad for the 3rd century BCE.

Meanwhile – that is, over two millennia later – an Englishman recognized the benfits of standardization.

Prior to the 1840s there was no universal standard for thread pitch - every manufacturer was left to their own devices. In a way, any screw pitch ... 

<parenthesis> 

This was a new usage to me. The best explanation I've found is a picture in the Manual of Engineering Drawing:  

</parenthesis>

... you could make, you could use and no one would have grounds to complain. At the same time, the product designers of the time had no readily available standards to pull from or common choices to pick between.

Naturally this led to severe fragmentation and millions of incompatible screws, nuts, and bolts - each slightly different. Larger companies narrowed in and developed their own internal guidelines, but these lacked the reach and accessibility of a singular standard. That was the case until Joseph Whitworth took the stage in 1841....

Joseph Whitworth developed a screw thread design that was adopted by major English railroad companies and quickly spread across the country. His papers on screw threads exposed the “evils” of figuring out thread pitches without a uniform standard. While Whitworth admits that any standard would be based on largely arbitrary decisions, and there would always be special cases that don’t fit the standard, he cautions that there is more to be lost by delaying and urges the attention of engineers across the nation. With the support of the railroads, then the Royal Dockyards and shipping companies, Whitworth’s 55-degree thread... [held sway for a  blissfully unchaotic 20-odd years].

Source

That use of quotation marks about "evils" struck me at first as the sort often used by naive writers to denote emphasis. But in his paper addressed to the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1841, Whitworth did use the term "evil" (although there was only one, albeit a pretty heinous one – the "embarrassment" of specifying thread pitches that are not "a multiple or submultiple of the common inch measure":

 The screw threads which form the subject of this paper are those of bolts and screws, used in fitting up steam engines and other machinery. Great inconvenience is found to arise from the variety of threads adopted by different manufacturers. The general provision for repairs is rendered at once expensive and imperfect. The difficulty of ascertaining the exact pitch of a particular thread, especially when it is not a multiple or submultiple of the common inch measure, occasions extreme embarrassment. This evil would be completely obviated by uniformity of system, the thread becoming constant for a given diameter. 

Source

). That's enough for now. I can't even give an unalloyed endorsement of You're Dead To Me; it's fun and informative, but I struggle to filter out the self-congratulatory sniggering of the presenter.

b