That's a great example and exactly the kind of thing I meant. My mind is littered with them! Although now there's one fewer: I hadn't considered that you can't replace every "it was" with "'twas".

There's just so much room for ever increasing nuance. Always something else that looks completely different if it's understood as a relation. Sometimes it's big ideas but not always (or often, really, as they're likely the first ones to reconsider).

I envy future generations who will never have to start the first however many decades of life learning an outlook that doesn't correspond with reality. They're going to achieve so much. It's hard to imagine.