Awkwardly Speaking

Chatter, chatter, everywhere. But none there is to speak!

The new year has kicked off a new chatter war. The cavalry is back in town, and the dominant mood is sociability. Anticipation and anxiety lay the starry-eyed students abuzz, yet lo! The stallions they ride are invalid donkeys, or maybe cross-eyed mules.

“So... where you, you know, living this year?”

The respondent’s head explodes in a stuttery short circuit.

“OK, nice to meet you!” he goes on, to the headless corpse issuing blood across the Hartley gazebo. The speaker waits for a reply amidst the airborne flurry of brain.

The freshmen know it too well already. Perhaps by February, they’ll get past whether they’re CC or SEAS.

That is, those who have survived the conflict. The undergraduate armies have already initiated preliminary social engagement from the highlands of Pupin to the slaughterhouse Hungarian Pastry Shop. It’s every man for himself, and strictly in monosyllables.

“So you... class... yes me too from there food spoon like woof like like like.”

“Oh my God, that is so true.”

According to Disraeli, “It is civilization that makes us awkward, for it gives us an uncertain position.” Does that make us the most civilized of all peoples in history? For surely, no others have so overused the word “awkward” in describing their own lives.

In fact, most other languages don’t have a word quite like it.

Whether it’s the guy who isn’t quite normal enough or the conversation that just fizzles out, it’s all “awkward” (except when it’s “random”), and we say it’s so. Awkwardness is our own pagan deity, the malevolent fairy who curses our interactions with the binding spell of discomfort. We, the young and educated, fear neither death nor internship application, yet a wave to an acquaintance on Broadway can prompt an epileptic fit, usually masked by a militant, full-frontal gaze.

“Awkward” means “in the awk [wrong] direction,” harkening back to the sunrise of the English language, when words’ meanings corresponded more fittingly to their parts. It was once used primarily physically, to describe someone’s gait, a tool, or unfavorable winds. One could “feel awkward” in an “awkward situation,” but increasingly, we describe other humans as “awkward,” as if awkwardness were the intrinsic characteristic of the “socially retarded”—the nerds, creeps, nuts, and the shy.

(A girl once called me “socially retarded,” and in a crisis of confidence I agreed with her. I should have realized that the “socially brilliant” person is a please-machine with no individuality.)

“Awkward” has morphed into a signal of the excess individualism of our age. Too impatient to concentrate on the person we’re communicating with, we obsess over the situation itself, and how it falls short of a standard of smoothness that can only be attained by phonies or by simple people who would never use such a word.

Deprived of privacy and introspection, we view ourselves through the imagined eyes of others—through resumes, Facebook albums, our carefully sculpted image, and the people we are associated with. The same external viewing haunts our basic interaction with strangers, which we follow with the cathartic phrase:

“That was so awkward.”

According to whom? Or, better ask, by whom? Duh—that winged fairy bitch gone done it!

Yet she’s just one threat to our lovely English language. There’s also shrinking vocabulary, disdain of poetry, contempt of hyperbole, the “like” epidemic, and indifference to storytelling and jokes. The loss of specificity of meaning, whereby “wonderful” and “awesome” have become the ugly twin sisters of “really good.”

But no threat is so great as our lack of appreciation of the merits and idiosyncrasies of our speech. Our language is worse than bland—it’s neglected. Most Western nations believe in the singular beauty of their language, which they consider an essential characteristic of nationality. Most continental European states have federalized cult followings of their national poets. We don’t.

Perhaps this is part of our linguistic open-mindedness. Many Americans seem willing to accept the development of Spanish as the United States’ second national language (we have no official language). That would not be the case in homogeneous European countries. But despite this relative tolerance when considering choice of language, the pervasive fear of awkwardness among our age group implies anything but openness to diverse styles of communication.

What makes this all quite sad is that there’s still much to love in our language. We have, for example, an immense variety of dictions to employ, from piratic and chivalric to Shakespearian and beyond:

“Yearrrgh, ye loggerheaded damsel in distress! I want some hot stuff right now or I will defenestrate my bod, my bod, my bod!”

That’s certainly not what any Columbia gent will be saying to his hook-up from last spring’s exam week. That wouldn’t be awkward—it’d be freaky.

Words are instruments which often control us, but if we appreciate some of their more enlightening or pernicious shapes, we might reinvigorate our neutered tongues. For even words like “awkward” can be put to good, if less frequent, use.

Alexi Shaw is a Columbia College senior majoring in Russian literature. Wordpecking runs alternate Fridays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com