So forgive the statistical ignorance, but how would one display mean and std dev in useful graphical form? (Asking seriously as it would be good to know which setting to press on gnu plot)
Not quite the same, but box-and-whisker plots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_plot) are good for visualising distributions. They show the mean, minimum, maximum and the first and second quartiles.
Since they show the minimum and maximum we can judge the overall spread, the mean tells us...well...the mean and first and second quartile lets us judge how close data is clustered around the mean.
These histograms are lacking in that they don't actually have the mean line or std devs on the plot itself; my general point is that if the goal is to get across a distribution, a histogram is the best way to do it, perhaps aided by markers for mean, median, std dev, etc., as the case merits.
They're typically used for confidence intervals or standard error, but you can theoretically use them with any measure of variability as long as you're clear.
