Clumsy: An awkward childhood tale
With an unedifying adult coda
When I was 11, my parents put my sister and I into a swimming class. Neither of us was confident in the water, and in New Zealand - a spaghetti-shaped island nation with a ridiculously high coastline-to-land-area ratio - knowing how to stay afloat at the beach was considered an essential skill.
I don’t remember much about the class except for one moment early on when our instructor had everyone line up on the edge of the pool and dive headfirst into the water. On cue, everyone did as told. Except for me and Beverley. Terrified, we both froze before bursting into tears.
This was not an isolated event. I was 10 before I found the confidence or skill to ride a bike. The one time I tried skateboarding, I ended up on my arse after about two seconds of unmitigated terror and arm flailing. The few times I have been on a horse have been an exercise in clinging on for dear life hoping desperately that the animal doesn’t move.
All of this has led me to envy people who are fully at home in their bodies. The ones who can hop on a e-scooter without a second thought and weave their way Beauden Barrett-like past pedestrians and fixed steel objects as though they weren’t there. People who can pick up a tennis racket for the first time and within minutes be firing tracer bullets across the net. Bastards who can wander out on the dance floor and not thrash about like a badly loaded washing machine on a spin cycle.
The first use of the word clumsy is attested in the late 1500s, when it meant “acting or moving as if benumbed”. It was a variant on the Middle English clumsid, which meant “numb with cold”. English probably took the word from Old Norse.
It took till the 1700s for clumsy to take on its modern meaning of “manifesting awkwardness”.
When I was a kid, someone who manifested awkwardness was often called a clumsy clot. Butterfingers, generally restricted as a descriptor for someone who can’t catch a ball, was also popular.
It’s no loss to the language that these twee usages have largely disappeared. Yiddish has the far superior schlemiel, from Peter Schlemihl, the hero of an 1814 children’s story who sells his shadow to the Devil in return for a bottomless wallet, only to find himself shunned by everyone, including the woman he loves. The story ends happily when Schlemihl realises the error of his ways, refuses the Devil’s offer to return his shadow in return for his soul, throws away the wallet, and is forgiven by his fellows.
You might think that klutz is also a Yiddish word going back aways, but in fact it’s a 1960s American English invention. It did come, though, from the Yiddish klots (“clumsy person, blockhead”), which took it from the Middle High German klotz, “lump, ball”. This is also where English gets clot.
Yiddish has gifted English with many great-sounding insults, for which I believe we should be deeply grateful. Schmuck is a doozy. Literally penis, it’s been around since the late 1800s and for many years was virtually taboo in Jewish society - and elsewhere. Lenny Bruce knew this; when he used the word as part of his schtick in the 60s, it got him arrested. If he’d said schmoe, a euphemistic version of the same word, he’d have been on safe ground. Schnook, a word used by gangster Henry Hill in Goodfellas to describe everyday people who live by the rules, is another likely variant on schmuck.
That shm- phoneme seems to hold a special place in Yiddish. Not only does it kick off numerous insults, it’s also the heart and soul of what linguists call the shm-reduplication, as in Oedipus shmoedipus. Those who know about this stuff believe Yiddish may have picked it up from a mix of Turkic Echo m- and East Slavic sh- several centuries ago, and that English got in on the act in the early part of the 20th century.
In 2003, linguists Andrew Nevins and Bert Vaux wrote a paper called Metalinguistic, Shmetalinguistic: The Phonology of Shmreduplication. Their goal: to map out the “rules” speakers observe when using shm-reduplication. For example, while it’s obvious that Oedipus shmoedipus works, what about bagel shmbagel? And if it doesn’t work (which it doesn’t, of course), how come? What rule tells users that it should be bagel shmagel?
In case you’re thinking it’ll always be obvious what works and what doesn’t, consider these pairings:
broom: shmoom
broom: shmroom
broom: smroom
When the researchers tested them on dozens of speakers, there was an even split in preference between the first two options, with the third option a distant last. But when they ran the same test using breakfast and street, respondents overwhelmingly chose the option that ignored the r.
To quote another Yiddishism, go figure.
If you read the paper, you’ll find what Nevins and Vaux actually did go figure from this. Let me just say that when a linguistics paper begins using arcane mathematical symbols to account for its results, I know I’m dealing with serious people who are heading down a path that’s beyond me.
As for me and my sister, we did end up diving - willingly - into that pool. Our instructor, who was surely ahead of his time, had us sit rather than stand on the edge of the pool and gradually lean forward until we gently tipped into the water. After we’d done that a few times, he had us do the same thing from a standing start. Then, having given us the chance to discover for ourselves that falling into the water wouldn’t kill us, he invited us to dive.
It was a pivotal moment in my life. I learned what it looks like to be a compassionate trainer - someone who starts from wherever their trainee happens to be, not from where they’d like them to be. It informed me when I became a parent, and it continues to inform me as a writing coach.
And I’m very happy to report that thanks at least in part to that coach, you can throw me into a swimming pool confident in the knowledge that I am unlikely to drown or even cry.
Just don’t, whatever you do, put me on your synchronised swimming team. That will end in tears, and they won’t be mine.
Bits and specious
Andrew Nevins is currently Professor of Linguistics at University College London. He hosts an engaging video series called The Mysteries of Language that’s well worth watching. Bert Vaux is Professor in Phonology and Morphology at Cambridge.
The inability to recall the right word for an object, place or person is called lethologica. It can lead to inventive solutions, such as the German customer in a Welsh pub forgetting the word cutlery and asking instead for “food weapons”. More here.
And you thought Covid made people less science literate.
Quote of the week
A malicious enemy is better than a clumsy friend.
Sophie Swetchine, Russian mystic
I loved this. Regarding lethologica, I have this problem quite often. I once forgot the word "hot" and said "spicy" instead.