In Competition No. 2891 you were invited to think of the most boring lecture topic possible and submit an extract from that lecture.

Christopher Gilbert gamely -submitted an extract from a real lecture he is due to deliver on the impenetrable-sounding topic of heteroscedasticity. But Brian -Murdoch, observing that it was all ‘a bit near the knuckle’, decided against putting his own genuine ‘Comments on the Prologues to the Old Frisian Laws’ into the ring. His fictitious offering not only made it into the winning line-up but also won him the bonus fiver. The rest take £25 each.

Scribal Division of Words at the End of Lines in Vernacular Prose Manuscripts of the 14th Century
… trisyllabic verbs and indeed perhaps also adjectives are, as one might expect, especially significant, given that the scribe had to assess quantitatively by syllable how many centimetres remained in which he could insert a more or less truncated dash, or, of course, some other indication of connection to the rest of the word at the start of the subsequent line, perhaps by a virgule over the final letter, as long as that was not itself an abbreviation, which could well be the case if the word contained a consonantal gemination at the end of the second syllable. I need hardly add that it would be plainly ridiculous to suggest that any scribe working after about 1327 would choose to leave an inflected ending pendant — that is, orphaned — by adopting a grammatically isolating word-division…
Brian Murdoch
 
The work of avant-garde photographer Barry Shand-Kidd, who has produced a body of over 3,000 ‘darkographs’ (made by leaving the lens cap on), remains largely unknown not only to the general public but even to most art world insiders. This lecture will argue that the critical and curatorial neglect Shand-Kidd’s work has suffered is, in fact, entirely justified. Each one of the 3,144 darkographs in the series will be projected in succession and individually analysed in order to demonstrate that what the artist has described as ‘[the] subtle, almost imperceptible differences [between them] … [which] both engage with and simultaneously challenge our perceptions of form and matter’ are entirely imaginary on his part, and that each non-image is in fact completely identical to every other.
Rob Stuart
 
Towards a taxonomy of removed cousins in early-Nordic kinship tabulae
Rather than plunge precipitately in medias res I shall begin by adumbrating in a brief preamble the prospect which lay before those twentieth–century genealogists who initially surveyed this largely untilled field of investigation. In 1972–3 Edward Broomhead, at that time the doyen of ecto-kinship studies, was leading a small but enthusiastic team — of whom I, confessedly, was one — in preliminary fieldwork centred in Bergen. Broomhead was a pioneer in borderless horizontal configuration but even he would disallow ‘non-pertinent’ -cousins more than five times removed. I well remember how exercised he became when someone — it might have been I — asked him how such an exclusion was consonant with his famous avowal that ‘ there should be no loose threads in the tapestry we work’. ‘My dear good fellow,’ he returned, ‘we are at the mercy of taxonomy!’ Today…
W.J. Webster
 
Semiology of the Steam Age by Dr Carol Lorac
… the earlier rotating signals gave way to the lower quadrant semaphore device with its blatant phallocentric imperative: erect, it spoke of prohibition, control and protection from danger for the ‘weak and wandering’ feminine stereotype, either in its absolutist ‘stop’ form or in the appropriately masculine ‘distant’ role. Remote manipulation and operation by levers, wires and rods furthered the reificiation process. The individual, already rigidly typed as first, second, or third class, was further disempowered by forced obedience to a tripartite morality of ‘stop’, ‘go’, or ‘proceed with caution’, all in the name of a supposedly beneficial, deified railway company (God’s Wonderful Railway, indeed), while the choice of red as the signifier for danger was designed to subtly condition the subject against the colour of worker’s solidarity and sexual expression. As Zoidberg has shown in his Some Smaller English Signal-Boxes…
Frank Upton
 
Tonight I want to explore with you a fascinating, indeed inexhaustible, topic from the realm of post-post-structuralism — the question of whether language can ever function as a satisfactory medium for interrogating the language we use to discuss and analyse the operation of language itself. That language must inevitably be considered apart from the supposed reality it purports to represent is, naturally, a given. Or is it? When we assert ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’, must we not take care to add, ‘This is not an assertion’? To do otherwise would be, at a deep level, a failure to acknowledge the dichotomy of signifier and signified. For a word both becomes and ceases to be an ungraspable Ding an sich in the moment that we employ it as a signifier of that which it is not, or that which it is. Let us begin by defining some of our terms.
Chris O’Carroll
 
Development of Machine Threads
The world’s first national standard was devised and specified by Mr (later Sir) Joseph Whitworth (1803–87). The new design required a 55° thread angle to a depth of 0.640327p and radius 0.137329p, where p represented pitch, which increased pari passu with the diameter, as referenced on an elaborate chart. Later denominated British Standard Whitworth (BSW), a noteworthy example of its use was in the construction of Royal Navy Crimean War gunboats, the primary instance of mass-production techniques applied to marine engineering; for upon raising the wreck of SS Xantho by the Western Australian Museum, it became apparent that, on disassembly, every engine nut and bolt was of Whitworth’s specification. BSW subsequently came to be adopted by manufacturers of railway tracks, superseding inferior, often haphazard profile configuration -criteria…
 
Mike Morrison

No 2894: verses for horses

You are invited to pen a poetic paean on a famous racehorse. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 15 April.