3 Things in October 2024

• Shell Pink is a colour: Benjamin Moore 883 to be precise. It is also a track from a 2016 album by Jakob Bro, Thomas Morgan and Joey Baron. The colour doesn’t do much for me but the track is quite lovely. I discovered it on the Tidal music app, where it was included on a mix recommended by a robot, or an algorithm, or maybe even artificial intelligence. I am particularly fond of Thomas Morgan’s bass playing, here and on other recordings¹.

• Splendid is a word that is vastly underused these days. It comes from the Latin splendidus, which means “bright,” “shining,” or “brilliant”, and it retained this sense when it was adopted into the English language in the 1600s. Over time however, its meaning shifted and it was used more loosely as a synonym for “excellent”. Usage fell off sharply at the end of the 19th Century, as the chart below shows. Fantastic and awesome seem to have taken its place, to some extent. That is a shame, because splendid is a great word. It conjures images in my mind of Sherlock Holmes shouting to Dr. Watson as they embark on an adventure from 221B Baker St².

• Has human nature evolved over time?
  • This is a question that I started thinking about while listening to the “The Rest is History” podcast. I’m the first to admit that my understanding of human history is rudimentary, at best, but listening to episodes about the Mongols or ancients Egyptians, I began to wonder if those distant events might have unfolded differently if the ancient world had been populated by people with modern sensibilities.
  • The general consensus seems to be that fundamental human nature hasn’t changed, but there has been cultural evolution. That is, we are the same, but our societies, norms and technologies have changed. I think this is an evasion. I mean, how can you separate the two? We can only deduce what human nature is by observing behaviours. If those behaviours change in some fundamental way (like greater observance of laws, or reductions in physical aggression) then that must be strong evidence that human nature itself has also changed³.
  • It’s a tricky, and probably unanswerable, question.

This is the second of my efforts to share three things every month. So far, so good…

I added a few friends’ emails to the list, so if you weren’t expecting this, that might be why. Don’t worry, there’s an unsubscribe button in every email. Use it as you please.

---

1. Morgan recorded a couple of albums with Bill Frisell a few years ago. HVW and I enjoyed seeing them perform together at the, now defunct, Jazz Standard in NYC. ↩︎
2. I’ve been rewatching Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes in the Granada TV series from the 1980s. I think they, and Brett in particular, are absolutely…. splendid. There will never be a better Sherlock: Prove me wrong. ↩︎
3. As I understand it, this is the thesis of Steven Pinker’s book “The Better Angels of Our Nature”. I need to have a look. ↩︎