At the end of the tunnel

Two years ago I wrote about a Voices Now  survey of choral singing in the UK.

The census estimates (conservatively) that over 2 million people sing regularly across the UK. This is similar to the number of Britons who go swimming on a weekly basis, and 300,000¹⁰ more than those playing amateur football each week^.11 However these two sports receive considerable public funding, in part because of the widely recognised benefits of regular¹² sports practice for mental and physical well-being and their role in local communities.

​

  10  2.52M swimming once a week (source: Active People Survey 10)

​

11 1.84M playing football once a week (source: Active People Survey 10)

12  Football - £30 million per year (source: Full Fact.org).
    Swimming -  £10 million(source: Sport England)

Aha – I interjected – but sport has physical and psychological benefits. Doesn't that explain the difference in government support? The Voices Now survey again:

Professor Graham Welch, Chair of Music Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, found that the health benefits of singing are both physical and psychological. “Singing has physical benefits because it is anaerobic activity that increases oxygenation in the blood stream and exercises major muscle groups in the upperbody, even when sitting. Singing has psychological benefits because of its normally positive effect in reducing stress levels.

Psychological benefits are also evident because of the increased sense of community, belonging and shared endeavour. 

​6 Heart Research UK, Singing  is Good for You, 2017

That was then and this is now. Choral singing has a new enemy that uses biological warfare, despite the fact that, as a recent study says, "[T]here is no secure, peer-reviewed data on the dangers of singing itself – taken in isolation, that is, from other potential contributors to outbreaks...". It goes on to list examples: "...close contact, shared drinks and snacks, as well as poor ventilation", all of which can be managed – some, admittedly, with more difficulty than others.

The study investigates

...how dangerous singing and playing woodwind and brass instruments are in the spread of Covid-19. Serious outbreaks of the virus were linked to choirs from countries including South Korea and the Netherlands this spring. Most notable was the terrible case of a choir rehearsal in Skagit County, Washington state, on 10 March. Out of 61 attending practice, 52 people fell ill. Two died.

<parenthesis expertise="0">

Part of a test. For the full picture,
see the original article

"...playing woodwind and brass instruments"?  Singing I can understand – despite the lack of peer-reviewed evidence against it.  But it seems to me that a woodwind or brass instrument is as good (as far as the mouth is concerned, and I'm not sure why a player of a wind instrument would want to waste air by breathing out through the nose – which leaves only sneezes...

<meta-parenthesis> 

[and surely, isn't sneezing nature's way of telling you not to go to a rehearsal?]

</meta-parenthesis>

...) as  any cloth mask (if not more effective) in the inhibition of aerosols. For bio-secure rehearsals I imagine there would have to be protocols for  disposing of the condensate (that's a euphemism for "spit"), but the air coming out of the instruments themselves is surely not a possible vector for the virus – not that the air moves that vigorously anyhow (a professional trombonist speaking in a BBC news interview observed that it was next to impossible to blow out a candle placed by  the bell of the instrument).
</parenthesis>

But this is getting dangerously close to gloomy rumination, which – despite evidence to the contrary  – I'm trying to avoid.

The report of the recent research continues:

The study that Costello has set up with Reid and other colleagues – funded by the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and sponsored by Public Health England – aims to insert some facts into the discussion. The researchers hope to publish their findings in a matter of weeks – incredibly fast by the usual standards of peer-reviewed academic publishing. 

Here's hoping.

b

PS My latest nomination for a FOGGY (recognizing bad writing - see here, and here's a taste):

The idea for the name derives from Robert Gunning's FOG index, although these awards don't restrict themselves only to obstacles to readability measured by that index.

Here it is:

Is this a recall notice? It claims to be, but the text doesn't say anything like 'Take this back for a full refund. You really really ought to do this ASAP". It's more as though some official department or other has said 'Recall this" and B&Q have decided to save money by falling back on bad writing.

The word "advise" works to ways in English (at least two ways, but these two are the relevant ones):

• advise + to-infinitive [that's ESOL-speak for what many  language learners know  as 'the infinitive"]
  Meaning: It would be wise to do this
  Example: He advised me to forget it
• advise + that + indicative
  Meaning: Here's some information. Act on it or not – it's up to you
  Example: Transport for London advises passengers that engineering work will...

But B&Q have conflated these two. They are saying 'Here's some information: do with it what you will.' (the second sort of advise), but disguising it as the first sort (with a subtext of "Anyone with any sense would take care with this jerry-built rubbish. The Health and Safety people say we've got to recall it, but we're not going to waste money like that.")

Update: 2020.07.27.09:30 – Added saxophone picture

Mute-you-all benefits

Four years ago, I wrote (here)

A choral singer knows he's getting on when, as for me this term, the next concert includes three choral pieces all of which he's sung before with another choir or choirs.

Well, in this brave new (lockdown)  world it's happened again. Earlier this month our multi-talented accompanist, Ben,  has taken advantage of this opportunity to use Zoom to hold a series of virtual rehearsals on the last 3 Fridays of July...

<stop-press>
(and the series goes on now, as he's holding further such rehearsals: details here)
</stop-press>

...The first was Parry's I Was Glad, which I've written about more than once (here and here, and possibly elsewhere). This was the first in the series, and I hadn't done any preparatory note-bashing...

<weasel-words reason="He would say that, wouldn't he?">
Ben was at pains to say this wasn't necessary. But we lesser mortals need to do some prep. I thought, having sung the piece many times before, I could busk it; but it's just as well that in Zoom rehearsals no one can hear anything...

<zoom-pun>
Whenever a Zoom host says "I'll mute you all" it strikes me that it's to our mutual [geddit?] benefit that we can't hear each other.
</zoom-pun>

...(except in the final sing-through, when we've got a recording to sing along to).
</weasel-words >

Next up is the dum-dee-dum bit from the Vivaldi Gloria. I've sung this more often than the Parry, but still need to do some note-bashing,  Fortunately it's in F, so I have a good chance of picking out the notes.

<autobiographical-note>

My least prepared rendition of this was towards the end of last century. One of my son's colleagues in Berkshire Youth Choir (and in a barbershop quartet it spawned) was also organist at his local church in Finchampstead. He was organizing a performance of parts of the Gloria.

As I was on taxi-duty that day, and knew the piece well, I became a singing chauffeur.

</autobiographical-note>

The last Friday session is the Hallelujah chorus, which will be in most amateur choir members' repertoire. Although I must have sung this more often than any other piece, I will still need to do some preparatory note-bashing. One stretch of repeated "Hallelujahs" always catches me out however often I rehearse it.

The swan-song of Ben's mini-season is also, as happens, a piece I've sung before, as it was one of the pieces featured in a WCS workshop some years ago (10-ish?) held by another Ben. I'm not sure I can make these sessions (and admittedly my enthusiasm for the music is not great), We'll see.

But I must put in an appearance in the land of the living. (Having been away in Norfolk for a week, I felt the need to show that the blog still has a pulse.)

b

Up the Gunners

Writing here back in 2013, initially about "magazine", I moved on to 

Another perfectly innocent storage word from Arabic has been... bellicosified (don't bother looking that up; it means 'given a martial meaning' ). The word in question derives from what looks to me like a phrase in Arabic: dār as-şinā‘ah (maybe Arabic can create composite nouns by joining smaller words together –  as indeed English does: Etymonline tells me dār means 'house' and as-şinā‘ah means 'art/craft/skill' –  a rather up-market sort of 'workshop'; come to think of it, English has borrowed from French le mot juste, an 'atelier').  

This spawned various words in Italian and its many dialects. In standard Italian the word is darsena – 'wet dock'. Moving north, the Venetian equivalent was arsenal, which was applied to a complex of naval dockyards and armouries, the Arsenale di Venezia. Various other languages got their foot in the door and borrowed that word, but shorn of its peaceable storage-and-work-related meaning. It wasn't until some workers from the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich formed a football team ('The Gunners') that  swords were beaten into ploughshares and the word was rehabilitated.

So  the Venetian dialect has given us the word "arsenal". which referred originally to a particular complex of buildings devoted to war at sea but has come to be used to refer to any store of weaponry.

Venetian also gives us (and many other languages) the word "quarantine", mentioned in passing (I was talking about dozen at the time) here:

In French -aine is a suffix that can make any number approximate; in English, though, dozen is the only ...

<digression>
I was hoping that, in recognition of the fact that flowers are sold in 10s and 5s, the word dizen would evolve (French dixaine). Sadly. it hasn't happened.
<digression>

...such word we have; quarantine is related, but came via Italian quarantina giorni – the period that ships from plague-ridden countries had to wait in the offing [never thought I'd use that one, except in the song "Blow the Wind Southerly"] before putting in at 17TH-century Venice.

That reference to Venice agrees with the received etymological wisdom (Susie Dent mentioned it in a recent Radio Times). But more recently (here) I mentioned Dubrovnik as a possible locus for the coining – though the Venetian dialect would have been influential there at one time, as Dubrovnik was under Venetian rule at the time.

Another Venetian word that, like "arsenal" gave English a word with a general application based on a particular usage in Venice is that place where Shakespeare housed Shylock – in the ghetto:

The term was originally used for the Venetian Ghetto in Venice, Italy, as early as 1516, to describe the part of the city where Jews were restricted to live and thus segregated from other people.
Source

But when Elvis used those words "in the ghetto" referred to 'a cold and grey ...

<parenthesis>
(Come to think of it, it was probably gray)
</parenthesis>

... Chicago morn'. In fact, many cities now have ghettos.

Another legacy of Venetian will have to wait for an update. It's time for tea.

b 

Update – 2020.07.06.13:55: Added  PS and fixed date in first line. 

PS

And here it is:

Another word that has come to us from Venice is "gazette". Here's what Etymonline has to say:

gazette (n.)

"newspaper," c. 1600, from French gazette (16c.), from Italian gazzetta, Venetian dialectal gazeta "newspaper," also the name of a small copper coin, literally "little magpie," from gazza; applied to the monthly newspaper (gazeta de la novità) published in Venice by the government, either from its price or its association with the bird (typical of false chatter), or both. First used in English 1665 for the paper issued at Oxford, whither the court had fled from the plague.

The coin may have been so called for its marking; ...The general story of the origin of the word is broadly accepted, but there are many variations:...

That page goes on to give details, which are many and varied, but the common threads are the bird (although one of them adds the rather sniffy "but it does not appear on any of the oldest Venetian specimens preserved at Florence") and the idea of idle chatter (Twitter comes to mind, a little anachronistically)...

<tangent subj="translation">
Speaking of anachronism, I am still fuming at the award-winning World's Classics translation of Os Lusíadas which sidesteps a rather tricky translation point by ignoring the original and inventing a 'heavy anchor chain' on a sixteenth century caravel, when the anchor chain was not invented until the nineteenth century – when ships started getting too heavy for hemp hawsers. And even then, a ship as light as a caravel wouldn't...

<inline-PPS>
This made sense when I wrote it, but probably needs a bit of explanation. I'm entering for the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation, as mentioned in a recent post. Part of my preparation involved looking at another translation, which

• Won an international prize 
• Is rubbish

</inline-PPS> 

But I must let it go.
</tangent>

...England had just such a coin , the farthing (a quarter of an old penny, so a 960th of a pound, about 00.01 oops, correction: .1 new pence, but the bird was not a gazza (thieving or otherwise). It was a wren:

Update – 2020.07.07.09:55:  Added inline PPS.

Desktop iconoclasm

<rant>
I blame the desktop publishing  software ("DTP"). When I was at OUP, many moons ago, all was right (recto) with the world. A recto was, as the name suggests, a right-hand page; and on its back, as the name suggests, was a verso. Page numbering started at 1 (or i in prelims, if you were old enough to be fussy about that stuff) on a recto. Except that,  as it was the title page, or the first page of text – in either case a display page – it had no page number (or folio, if you're toeing the Hart's Rules line). A satisfying mixture of Latin, arbitrary rules, and even more arbitrary exceptions, made publishing workers feel special, acolytes in an arcane priesthood.

Then along came DTP, and any Thomasina, Ricarda, or Harriet had the keys to the tabernacle of editorial arcana; they started spraying page numbers around willy-nilly as if there were no rul... Well, I suppose there aren't any more...

<meta-rant>
(and that's another thing; "any more" as one word)
</meta-rant>

...rules, that is.

<meta-rant>
(and that's another  'nother thing; automatic hyphenation. The-/rapist, ency-/clopedia, leg-/end, te-/aching; who writes these misbegotten algorithms? Why not spend some time doing it manually... thoughtfully before dreaming up a bit of software that's guaranteed to go on getting it wrong until Hell freezes over?)
</meta-rant>

</rant>

But what it is is "enabling  technology" – a Good Thing, I suppose. Gutenberg...

<parenthesis>
(or Gänsfleisch, to give him his proper name:

According to Heinrich Wallau, writing in The Catholic Encyclopedia:

Gutenberg was the son of Friele (Friedrich) Gänsfleisch and Else Wyrich. His cognomen was derived from the house inhabited by his father and his paternal ancestors "zu Laden, zu Gutenberg". The house of Gänsfleisch was one of the patrician families of the town, tracing its lineage back to the thirteenth century."

 So, as I said here.

Johannes was as much Johannes Gutenberg as Leonard Woolf was Leonard Hogarth  (whose business just took its name from Hogarth House) 

)
</parenthesis>

...revolutionized the means of disseminating information in the fifteenth century. This put the power to spread the word in the hands of anyone who had access to a printing press (whereas previously – in the West, at least – that  power had been in the hands of  the Church, so that there were strict limitations on what that Word could be). The Church was understandably annoyed  at this encroachment on their monopoly, and argued strongly that such empowerment was a Bad Thing. (Rightly; there do have to be standards; there do have to be rules to prevent perversions of justice. But the Pope doesn't have to  brandish his imprimatur ...

<etymological-note>
and trust Holy Mother Chorch. as Father Steven used to say in my history classes, to hide the agent of a ruling behind the passive voice and in an obscure language: "it may be printed". 

</etymological-note>

... like a spoilt teenager, just because).

So, going back to my opening  rant, you may have noticed that I used the metaphor priesthood. So where does that put me in the case of the Church and Gutenberg? I have to admit, through clenched teeth, that DTP was a Good Thing. (That doesn't mean. though, that I find its giving power to the people comfortable.

<inline-PS>
My feelings on seeing an odd page number on a left-hand page, when someone's cutNpasted from a published source and then re-paginated ...

<rant rejoinder= "Eppur si muove">
(without having the common courtesy to add blank pages to keep the spreads right)
</rant> 

... need have no repercussions in the real world, however violent they may be.
</inline-PS>

 )

Enough for now.

b

Update: 2020.06.2912:05 – Added inline PS.

Reservio Dogs...

(a tribute to Google, which helpfully suggested that I might have mis-typed, or to  use my own coining, committed a stenoglurch.)

Remember Consignia (a short-lived attempted rebranding for  grouping together all the one-off brands that used to form part of the "GPO")? As  the BBC put it at the time, under the headline Consignia: Nine letters that spelled fiasco :

A duffer. A howling waste of money. 

The most ruinous decision since the biblical scam that saw Esau swap his birthright for a bowl of stew. 

Think "Post Office Group", think trust, honour, gritty postmen braving blizzards to save a child's smile. 

Think "Consignia", the name which replaced it. Think, um, Roman general? Footballer? Tummy bug? 

More

This was not the only company in the early noughties that went in for a fancy foreign-looking ...

<apologia>
(not that I have anything against foreignness  – indeed, whenever someone starts a sentence with "So" and a pause, I experience one blissful moment of hope that they will continue "is  the French for bucket"}
</apologia>

...word that ended with a diphthong. Our local tip (or to give it its more woke name domestic refuse recycling facility) has instituted a system of reservations – called "Reservio". At first I thought this must be a child of the fancy of some Veolia (they're the recyclers) executive with no sense of the ridiculous.

But Reservio, it turns out, is another of those noughties coinings  (or very nearly – the website was registered in   2010, so there must have been a series of meetings in 2009 when the creation of this chimera was mooted.)

Translation News

Meanwhile, back at the Stephen Spender  Prize, which I suppose is nearly an annual tradition (since I entered last year too) I've been thinking about the relative fortunes of complacent and complaisant – apropos of nothing much (except that one of them cropped up in what I was doing). They don't necessarily mean the same (though there's a good deal of potential overlap, and Collins goes so far as to say that they used to be synonymous in British English and still can be in American English.

They differ, when spoken, in only the voicing of the /s/|/z/ phoneme, which (what linguists call "homonymic clash" and ordinary people call "pun") usually in the development of languages leads to the ousting of one (somewhere in this blog I've cited the case of "let" as in the legal  jargon "let or hindrance" and the tennis player's "let" – both meaning something like obstacle).

<rant fierceness="a million suns">
(and the commentator who insists on saying "let-cord", suggesting that it's something to do with the net-cord, rather than just SOMETHING GOT IN THE WAY. As a matter of fact, it usually is the net-cord that gets in the way, but it could be a pregnant albatross or a drone, anything. And not only a thing. It could be a flash of lightning. They'd still play a let. 

When this bloke (I think it's only one) says "let-cord" it  makes  me want to... count to ten and think of my Happy Place, because otherwise I might have a seizure).
</rant>

When the Great Vowel Shift made the impeding sort of "let" and the allowing sort of "let" uncomfortable bedfellows, one of them had to go; so now "let" almost always means "allow" (except for fossils like the ones I've mentioned, on passports, say – even on the red-covered pre-Brexit ones).

Well, Google displays these unattributed graphs:

The demise of "complaisant"

The rise of "complacent"

Call me old-fashioned, but I'm not a fan of unattributed citations, so I went to Collins again (whose trend charts are at least attributable, even though they stop short 2 years shorter, and don't give quite so clear a picture of the reciprocal fortunes (if I was more of a geek I'd overlay these 2 curves; I'll have to leave that to your imagination.)

The Collins charts are:

"Complaisant":( I wonder why the bottom fell out of the market in the 18th century.)

"Complacent": a steady-ish rise in fortunes

Time I continued with the Great Garden Furniture Refurbishment. There's just time for one more item of Translation news. In the John Dryden Translation Competition my entry (mentioned in an autobiographical note in this post) made the Long List (but got no further). Top quartile but no cigar, as they say. Oh well, onwards and upwards.

b

Nabucco

My choir's latest virtual rehearsal was based on what is known in England as "The chorus of the Hebrew slaves" (so much better as the Coro di Schiavi Ebrei, as our copy had it...

<TYPO status="dubious" reason="old language?">
I think, though my knowledge of Italian is based on a course I did in 1992. the modern Italian would have degli in place of di. This would be yet another example of archaism in the 19th century text, like those I noted here

In his text for Va pensiero, Verdi (or his librettist if he had one ...? 

<stop-press date="June 2020">
Yes he did – the splendidly named Temistocle Solera
</stop-press >

...) does not use dove, in

Ove olezzano tepide e molli 

L'aure dolci del suolo natal

...

The ove shows that at one stage some Italic dialects followed the French path, without an initial d. 

<background>
Earlier in the same post I had written:

The word for 'where' has a chequered history in the Romance Languages. Simply put (which is all I'm up to) it is derived from UBI [='where'] or UNDE [='where from'], with or without an initial DE. So French où comes from UBI, Italian dove comes from DE + UBI and Spanish is 'etymologically pleonastic' when it asks 'Where are you from?'; '¿De dónde eres?' starts with DE DE UNDE, meaning 'from[from[from where]]]'.

<stop-press date="2020"> 

Catalan is like Castilian in its preference for derivation from UNDE, but without the pleonastic d: it uses plain on. So, far from adding a d at the beginning of the word, it drops one from the end.)
</stop-press>

And what in modern Italian would be aire is aure (reminiscent, to me, of the two possible forms in Portuguese of the word derived from CAUSA(M): Fr. chose, Italian and Spanish cosa, but Portuguese [modern Continental Portuguese, that is] either coisa or cousa  – to be filed under Interesting but irrelevant I suspect). 

</background>

As Metternich...

<parenthesis>
"needs citation", to use Wikipedia's passive-aggressive  gibe, but my history teacher used to say it, and what's good enough for Mr Crosby is good enough for me
</parenthesis>

...said at the time 'Italy is a geographical expression'. The name VERDI was a coded feature of political graffiti, standing for Vittorio Emanuele Rei D'Italia. (And, now I think of it, the Hebrew Slaves have an allegorical relevance: the people of that geographical expression had been "enslaved" for centuries by various imperial powers.)
</TYPO>

Covid Chronicles 

The rehearsal (like most things these days: I wonder what's happened to the share price) was done over Zoom. For my madrigals group I use a tablet, which can put  nine thumbnails on one screen; it's a small group, so two screens is the most it runs to. But with the choir – with more than forty (60 or 70 on a good day) – I prefer to revert to my desktop PC, which runs to 2/3 screensful.

But it has no integrated camera. I've found a very old webcam, which I can't get to work. The PC itself is old enough (it runs Windows 7, no longer supported by Microsoft [and this old post sums up  my feelings about computer support:

She...[MrsK] asked a passing school-leaver [in PC World] if there were any known support issues with application software (I'm paraphrasing here, you understand) and the answer was, surprisingly enough, that everything was hotsy-totsy with Windows 8. 

Well, twenty years of working with software engineers (actually, 19¾ – HP took the penny-pinching precaution of shafting me 3 months before they would have had to fork out for a 20-year award) has taught me that if anything can go wrong with new software it will. This was true of Windows 95, and with everything since. Working in 'Support', which I did for many years, involved me almost daily in fixes and workarounds and you-just-can't-do-that-any-more when people tried to get existing application software to play nice with a new operating system.

]), but the webcam pre-dates even that – the user guide doesn't mention Windows 7 (only its predecessors Windows 2000 and Windows XP).

So my participation in the rehearsals is haunted by a photo of me (taken, now I think of it, when I was using Windows XP). The picture is in a file called mugshot.bmp, which gives an idea of its lugubriousness.

Tha'sall. Time I showed my face in the Real World.

b

Brother Lawrence / in the scriptorium / with a quill

Medieval Cluedo?

Yestreen...

<gloss>

I'm trying to get this charming abbreviation for "yesterday evening" re-adopted.

According to Collins it's Scottish and pretty rare But their "usage trends" graph shows that (back in the nineteenth century) it was all the rage.

</gloss>

... my choir sang this:

Manuscript from Reading Abbey, but probably produced in Oxford.
(see David Crystal, The Stories of English [2005], p. 108)

In  The Stories of English David Crystal says

Reading Abbey did not have a scriptorium, so the manuscript was probably copied at Oxford.

This gives the rota or "round" a double relevance to our choir, as a good few of us live in the Reading area, and both our MD and our accompanist studied at Oxford.

But why Sumer? Isn't it the wrong bird? The cuckoo arrives in Britain in April. Crystal gives the answer:

There was no contradiction, because in Middle English sumer was the only word available to describe the period between the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. The word spring to refer to the season is not recorded in English until the mid-sixteenth century.  

The Stories of English

That Crystal book has reminded me of a pipe-dream I discussed here

<digression theme="pipe-dream" likelihood="0">
Penguin missed a trick (or more likely decided that the trick wasn't worth the outlay) with this book. It was written like a coffee-table book, with two or three sorts of text and standalone features, quite like Words: An Illustrated History of Western Language (which I had a small part in publishing – but a bigger part than I wanted [and that's a whole 'nother story] ). But Penguin just squeezed it all together with tiny margins and no kind of visual clues to what sort of text was which. 

<inline_ps date="2020">
"No sort of visual clue" is strictly a bit of an exaggeration. The designer has done what he or she could in the cost-reduced circumstances of what the trade knows (or knew in my day) as a "mass-market paperback". If you know what to look for it makes sense. There's a vertical rule down the margin of the standalone features; but it's easily missed, and the reader only realizes what's happened when the syntax of two unrelated sentence parts makes the inconsistency felt.
</inline_ps> 

The reader's never sure whether the current text is part of the main argument or part of an illustrative aside. It needs changes in line-length or font or shade of paper to make it a smooth reading experience.

<sub_digression>
In fact, the writing so obviously has this sort of treatment in mind that I suspect it was written to order for another publisher but that the contract fell through. The typescript then got bought by another publisher whose needs were at odds with the book as written. Maybe not though – who knows...?
<sub_digression>

My fantasy – though I haven't discussed this with the good Professor – is to win a large amount of money and become a proper publisher. My Rights department would negotiate with Allen Lane to acquire the rights for a properly designed book, and my Design department would make this book CanDo Publishing's lead title.
<digression> 

<tangent>
In researching this post I've come across my latest nomination for a Tezzy ("Time-wasting Site of the Year".  I haven't dabbled yet, but imagine the temptation will get the better of me in the end.  Here it is, the British Library's Medieval Manuscripts Blog
</tangent>

Enough for now.

b
PS An irrelevant quandary:

My attention has been brought to this petition, and I'm in a quandary about signing it. I know I shouldn't be, as it obviously addresses a critical issue.

<parenthesis>
(My first choice of wording in that last sentence was "It clearly addresses", but while it does obviously address the issue, clarity is hardly characteristic of the way it goes about it. The "writer" has had a thought, taken a number of words in the relevant area, and spewed them out onto the page in the hope that the reader will organize them into something meaningful; with any luck, that meaning will match the meaning intended. 

I am reminded of Sheridan (père's) words (used to drum up business for a teacher of how to write)

We write with ease to show our breeding 

But easy writing's curs'd hard reading. 

) 

</parenthesis>

I want to subscribe to the gist without subscribing to the woeful wording. I do wish people would give some thought to what they're writing, rather than scatter-brainedly  conjuring up a bunch of more or less relevant words and leaving it to the reader to arrange them into a thought. How's this for a doozie?

It is important to learn about Black History and unteach this ignorance as some children may not choose to educate themselves and just listen to the people around them and be influenced causing people to hold racist views and pass them down many generations meaning the cycle of racism and systematic oppression will never end.

Fifty-five words with no punctuation. and daisy-chain syntax. The people the petition is addressed to are almost guaranteed to dismiss it as intemperate ravings.

I guess I'll sign, but with a heavy heart.

Update: 2020.06.06.16:20 – Added inline PS.