海角大神

Awkwardness goes in the wrong direction

The story of a familiar word shows how words carry their history within them.

Verbal Energy

I had what you might call an awkward encounter the other day. It happened right at my desk, with the word awkward itself.

It鈥檚 a word I鈥檝e known all my professional writing life, but just the other day, it occurred to me to wonder: Where is it going?聽

That second syllable, -ward, is 鈥渁n adverbial suffix expressing direction.鈥� The syllable comes from an ancient meaning 鈥渢o turn, to wind.鈥�

When Thomas Wolfe counseled in the title of his first novel, 鈥淟ook Homeward, Angel鈥� (quoting a phrase from 鈥檚 1637 elegy 鈥淟ycidas鈥�), he meant 鈥淟ook toward home.鈥�

Most of the 鈥渨ard鈥� ideas are conveyed nowadays not with adverbs (鈥淗e headed homeward鈥�) but with prepositional phrases with toward: 鈥渢oward home鈥� or, more abstractly, 鈥渢oward a resolution of the problem.鈥�

That鈥檚 probably just as well. Otherwise, we鈥檇 end up with a lot of ad hockery: officeward, for instance, as the counterpart to homeward, or even Starbucksward, for those who want to ensure that 鈥溾�� are well represented in the lexicon of adverbs.

So where is awkward heading? Toward 鈥渁wk鈥�? More or less, yes 鈥� speaking strictly etymologically. The explains awkward as going back to the middle of the 14th century and meaning 鈥渋n the wrong direction.鈥�

I can imagine somebody coming out of a tavern in the evening, climbing onto his horse, mistaking one dimly lit path (was there any other kind in the 14th century?) for another, and finding himself a few hours later in the wrong village. That would be a quintessential 鈥渁wkward situation.鈥�

Awk, as a stand-alone adjective, meant 鈥渢urned in the wrong way.鈥� When I was in college, I had a professor who, when any of our class would turn a phrase the wrong way in writing a paper, would note in red ballpoint ink in the margin of the page, 鈥淎wk!鈥�

It became the thing one wanted most to avoid.

The Online Etymology Dictionary reports that there were other formations from awk, none of them surviving: awky, awkly, and awkness. Given the enduring human capacity for dumb mistakes, I should think we could still be getting some use out of these words if we hadn鈥檛, in effect, set them out on the curb for recycling.

Awk itself went obsolete in the 17th century. Awkward lives on, of course; it鈥檚 meant 鈥渃lumsy鈥� since at least the 1520s. Awkwardness was in use to mean 鈥渟ocial embarrassment鈥� by the late 18th century.

But that sense of misdirection remains embedded in the word. Words tend to carry their history within them.

They鈥檙e like names for real estate subdivisions that may seem a bit fanciful but tend to have a nub of truth to them. (鈥淭here was a farm here under all this asphalt? Really?鈥�)聽

The clues are there if you know where to look.