Awkward is a word that is itself awkward, its sound and spelling somehow slightly off, and off-putting, “awk” meaning odd, and “ward” denoting direction, indicating an odd path we occasionally wander down, despite our best efforts, an uncomfortable experience of backwardness, touching every human life periodically, and maybe even methodically for some of us more than others. For better or worse, we frequently feel bound by the niceties of our social contracts, and when these contracts inevitably fail us from time to time, by someone sharing too little or too much or simply through the accidental enactment of a faux pas, the colloquial foot in the mouth, we notice the funny oddness at the core of our relationships. There is something simultaneously proper and absurd about how we commonly connect with one another, our sense of propriety: what we safely speak, or keep silent about, what we politely do, or refrain from, and the timing of it all, as if a relationship were essentially a drama, with all of us the characters continually striving to discern our parts, donning and doffing different masks and wearing many hats. An awkward moment disrupts this facade. Whether embarrassing or comical or a bit of both, we are candidly reminded through awkwardness how the social rules we play by lie somewhere in between ironclad and arbitrary, and serve us best when they are poked fun at now and again, by a blunder, blooper, or Freudian slip. Eloquence is often admired as the opposite of awkwardness, and in many respects it is, though not all, for there is something honest and refreshing about an awkward person or moment, an unusual beauty in the unpretentious presence of one who fumbles and stumbles and lays bare their true colors and not only the pleasing ones.