Why ‘Awkward’ — or ‘Umgelumpert’ — is the word of the day
Journalists have settled on a word to describe the Jan. 6 election certification, but is it the right one?
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris shakes hands with U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson after Harris certifies the Electoral College vote. Photo by Getty Images
By Aviya Kushner January 6, 2025
When headline writers try to describe the weirdness of Jan. 6, and the surreal experience Vice President Kamala Harris has had today, the word “awkward” keeps coming up.
“Harris Faces an Awkward Election Task: Certifying the Vote She Lost,” The New York Times blared.
I’m pretty sure this will be an “awkward” day for Joe Biden too, so I typed “Biden” and “awkward” into Google.
Whew.
Time magazine, for example, used “awkwardness of the moment” to describe Biden welcoming Trump into the Oval Office. At the same time, the word “awkward” has repeatedly been used to attack Biden.
For instance, On Demand News on YouTube got more than 200,000 views for “Joe Biden’s Most Awkward Gaffes of 2024.”
Then, of course, there are other “awkward” aspects of this bizarre “moment.” A recent BBC headline pointed out the “awkward parallels between the Biden and Trump convictions.”
So let’s talk about awkward, the word.
“Awkward,” according to Merriam-Webster, means “showing the result of a lack of expertness” as well as “lacking ease or grace.” It also means “lacking the right proportions, size, or harmony of parts” as well as “lacking social grace and assurance” and best of all, “causing embarrassment.”
Certainly, welcoming a man convicted of a felony into the presidency lacks the “right proportions,” and plenty about today could be construed as embarrassing — Harris has had to draw on a lot of “grace” to make it through today.
But let’s move on to the obsolete definitions. Merriam-Webster offers one — “perverse” — but the Oxford English Dictionary, home to all the layers of the English language, tells us that there are 17 definitions of “awkward” in the English language, and eight of those are obsolete.
“The earliest known use of the word awkward is in the Middle English period (1150-1500),” the OED says. “OED’s earliest evidence for awkward is from 1340, in the writing of Richard Rolle, hermit and religious author.”
Incredibly, the word “awkward” makes up for seven out of every million words used in today’s modern written English. (That number may go higher with this presidency shift.) In fact, we might want to expand our vocabulary to include “awkwardish,” a word that has been around since the 1600s.
As usual, Yiddish, the language of shlemiel and shlemazel, has a great word for awkward. The sound itself captures this moment — umgelumpert. And for “awkwardness” there is the fabulous umgelumpertkayt. To stay sane in this moment, you can always plug in varieties of the word “awkward” into the Yiddish word and phrase tool at the University of Kentucky.
But back to the OG “awkward.”
The OED points out that “awkward” is both an adjective and an adverb, though the adverb is obsolete. But hey, it meant “In the wrong direction, in the wrong way.” Starting in the 1340s, it meant “Upside down; hindside foremost.” (That sounds right to me.) And the Oxford even offers an example, which I am quoting because all of it is fabulous, including the source: “Þe world þai all awkeward sett” from R. Rolle, Pricke of Conscience, 1541
I also liked the 1440s-era definition: “In a backward direction, with a back stroke.”
Most of all, though, I feel partial to obsolete adverb definition 7a in the Oxford English Dictionary. “Not easy to deal with; requiring cautious action; euphemistic for ‘rather dangerous’.”
Yup. I think some of us are afraid to say “rather dangerous,” or maybe we are too tired to face it again.
In a moment when Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes of The Washington Post quit after her cartoon showing tech titans on bended knee in deference to Trump wasn’t allowed to run, and after an election season when uber-wealthy men like Jeff Bezos at WaPo and Patrick Soon-Shiong at The Los Angeles Times refused to run presidential endorsements, it may feel safer and easier to say “awkward” instead of the word that really seems to fit here — “Dangerous.” Or, the British understatement of the centuries, “rather dangerous.”
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