On Auks and Awkwardness

Not upward or downward, backward or forward, but awkward. Awk-wards: a vector. The (now obsolete) word awk means out of the way, strange, even sinister in nature and disposition. As an adverb, awkward suggests an action in the wrong, or at least a tangential direction. It evokes disjuncture, discord and incompatibility. Things have gone awry. As an adjective, awkward describes the unfamiliar, the clumsy and the unskilled. It conveys embarrassment, inconvenience and risk. To be awkward is to be ill at ease, uncomfortable or untoward. 1 Awkward offers a rich, polysemous term through which we might specify and explore creatures and modes of multispecies relations. As adjective and adverb it has at least two important valences for animal studies and the environmental humanities that I will explore in this short commentary. I open with some general observations before proffering another awkward creature and mode of relating.