Intermediaries like guards, scribes, and servants lubricated elite-mass interaction

Evidence

In short, these two worlds could not have been as mutually exclusive as Toledano has pointed out and the various intermediaries of guards, scribes, servants, etc. must have played a crucial role as social lubricants. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 109

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: A servant who feigns ignorance of his master’s language to litigate a street brawl is a vivid scene — a low-ranking bilingual fixer mediating two speech worlds could anchor a historical fiction.
• XREF: connects to: Flash agents mediate cross-cultural contact at lightning speed and dictate relation. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 842