That freshman is so awkward. Look at how awkward my butt is in these pants. Would it be awkward if I smoked in your car, Gam-gam? You have asthma? Awkward, LOL!
How did awkwardness become the new coolness? If Dazed and Confused (and Matthew McConaughey) was the model movie for teens, pre-teens and post-teens in the 90s, are Superbad and Michael Cera the “its” for the aughts? I hope not! They’re going to kill awkwardness the same way D&C killed sitting suggestively mustachioed in high school parking lots. Before it fizzles out, let’s see where awkward came from: a now barely-known Brit named Nate.
It all started on a lively Spring morning in 1674 when the now-forgotten English author Nathaniel Fairfax famously wrote, “Birds…build nests with such an awk tool, their beak.” It was a brilliantly stupid quote that would later be used as an example of the word “awk(ward)”’s first truly awkward usage.
Awkwardness is sort of a fall-back method artistic expression for artists who have grown bored with the conflict of good and evil or found it too difficult to go blabbering on about love and death. Instead of referring to the bird as “diabolically queer” like Edgar A. Poe did with ravens, Nate finds a word, “awk,” that manages to politely convey the freakish quality of the bird without any major judgment.
Moreover, if we translate Fairfax’s quote into contemporary vernacular, it could be transformed into an even more moronic phrase: “‘Birds build like, nests and stuff with such an awkward tool. Birds and beaks are so awk,’ Peyton said pompously.” So only birds can be awkward? Not anymore, but it used to just be birds before Darwin came along and said, “Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.” This, by all means, was a rude awakening for animals who had thought that we were cool with being equal with each other.
Before Chuck Darwin invented evolution and the survival of the fittest, it was very popular among the English literati to discuss the bizarre behavior of animals, so as to emphasize their inferiority. Surely, though, Darwin meant to include humans in his theories, so why have we not evolved past our own awk social behavior in the way birds have evolved past their awk beaks?
Because unlike avians, humans have evolved to the point at which certain undesirable traits may be reappropriated by mass media and made marketable. In other words, we don’t need to evolve past awkwardness or perversity because Hollywood tells us one day they’ll be popular. Positives from this: Gary Busey. Negatives: Dan Deacon. So, where did awkwardness come from?
It came from Neanderthals, the most awkward of all our ancestors, and the most made extinct in a short period of time for being so awkward around the socially-superior Cro-Magnons. Imagine a Neanderthal perusing the icy tundra for berries. Lost and stumbling through the forest, he discovers a secret hot spring where he finds a Neanderlady taking a bath. Too awkward to make any sort of move, he sits for hours and ruminates comically about his lack of sufficient body fur, his under-extended brow, his Steve Carell-esque virginity – his inferiority. By the time he’s done deciding whether or not he should approach the fecund bather, she has disappeared. Returning to his camp, he finds that his family has starved to death because he spent all his foraging time ogling a bathing ape.
Fast forward a few billion years. We now have a branded Judd Apatow form of male laziness and nerdiness, which according to Superbad et al is rewarded with women with superior social success. This is similar to how male slovenliness used to be rewarded according to The Honeymooners up to The Simpsons; with films like Knocked Up, the nerd-slob merge is complete.
Sadly, while male standards of attractiveness (or tolerability among females) vary, slovenly, dorky ladies are falling by the wayside. Ellen Page was pretty slovenly in Juno, drinking Sunny D and being with child, but there was something very sad about her “situation” that didn’t quite allow her to achieve the adorable, Michael Cera-esque pinnacle of awkwardness. How can girls have babies and be awk at the same time? One day in the near future, science will give men the gift of childbirth, and maybe then we can all be awkward together. Especially when that first guy actually has a baby, and it’s really, really gross. Ew, so awkward.
