If, for some reason, you don’t delight in hearing the word “awkward” overused, Dartmouth is a bad place to be. The word has saturated the diction and culture of the school. Three comics pages in the October Dartmouth (October 4, 12, and 27) feature comics whose punchlines are nothing more than statements of awkwardness. Last year, Dartmouth Everywoman Stephanie Herbert found herself using “awkward” so often that she abbreviated it to “awk” to save time, a convention that has caught on with some segments of campus. With 485 members, “Holy Shit, I’m Awkward!” is the fourth-largest facebook group at Dartmouth, just behind “Dartmouth ‘09s,” which has 585 members – 104 of whom are also holy-shit awkward. In short, “awkward” is a verbal and mental tic that almost everyone on this campus shares. Here, we will discuss its origins and uses, and why it must die.

As used at this school, the word “awkward” denotes a momentary, unpleasant lapse in politeness and conventionality. An awkward situation is one in which someone says or does something uncouth, causing the normally well-lubricated social machinery to grind to a halt. An awkward action or statement is one that leads to the above situation. An awkward person is one who regularly inflicts awkwardness on him- or herself and others. In its myriad forms, the word “awkward” at Dartmouth points to a break in the smooth social veneer that we are all accustomed to perpetuating.

The word has uses beyond its definition. First, “awkward” makes unfunny people funny. People use it, often inaccurately, to make it seem as though they or others are acting hilariously ineptly. So, “I walked home with Rob’s girlfriend last night,” a statement of fact, becomes “I walked home with Rob’s girlfriend last night. It was awkward” – instant hilarity! Awkwardness is an easily accessible and reliable source of humor. This is largely why it is used to death, and shoehorned into situations in which it really doesn’t belong.

More interesting is the use of “awkward” to dispel real or perceived awkwardness. If something has happened that could be considered awkward, someone can always be counted on to say, “Well, this is awkward,” and everything is fine again. “Awkwardness” at Dartmouth is simultaneously a way to denote things that are outside the fold and a way to bring them back in. If something is intense, uncomfortable, or unexpected, “awkward” will diffuse it.

And that is why “awkward” deserves to die: not because it is far overused and has ceased to refer to social discomfort and begun to connote the idea of social discomfort (although that, too, is an excellent reason), but because it represents repression, a subtle and subconscious kind of social orthodoxy. As Dartmouth students, we are used to compartmentalizing ourselves: we have our student selves, our model-citizen selves, our drinking selves, our selves as lovers. We are completely fluent at playing social games of all kinds, or we wouldn’t be here. So why are we so fascinated by awkwardness? Because awkwardness occurs when someone forgets to play a game, or plays the wrong one. Awkwardness is when reality rubs through our layers of subtle dishonesty; “awkward” helps keep this from happening.

Dartmouth is a self-satisfied, comfortable, insular and orthodox culture, a sleepy small town full of privileged children for whom social lubrication of all kinds is second-nature. Vox Clamantis in Deserto is our frightening and beautiful school motto, but far more accurate for today’s Dartmouth would be No Sharp Edges. I am not complaining: Dartmouth is a haven; its lack of brutality, in some sense of reality, is what makes it so alluring. At Dartmouth, we have come to expect smooth sailing, and it’s wonderful that our expectations are so rarely overturned. But “awkward” is the catchphrase of a campus (or a generation – I’m told that the word is big across the country) that values comfort over authenticity. Of course, the idea of acting absolutely authentically, of being completely real, is far too frightening for most of us to even look at directly – and, even if it weren’t, we wouldn’t know how to go about doing it. But that doesn’t mean we need to make the situation worse. Dropping the subtle strangulation of “awkward” would be a step in the right direction.