Word: awkwardly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...risk when they made race an avowed category of diversity. They may have hoped that race would cause no more trouble than geography, that finding able blacks would be as easy, or as hard, as finding able Californians. The risk was that nothing untoward would emerge, no awkward fact calling into question the association of diversity and merit. Unfortunately, once race is on the list of things to look for, it is hard to take it off unobtrusively...
Lewis is correct to say that "first-year" can make for some awkward linguistics. If there were a "grammatically convenient and linguistically graceful alternative [to 'freshman'] that could be used everywhere," he wrote, he would prefer using it. It is true that "first-year" can make for some awkward constructions, but when has less-than-graceful wording ever stopped Harvard before? And schools that have already adopted "first-year," such as Columbia, Williams, Brandeis, Bowdoin, Trinity, Bates and Colby seem to have no problem with...
...physical space, common Ex fare, but here again, the experiments were novel. The light table and operator sat on the stage below the audience rather than behind it, and the chorus had their own table to sit at like a committe or a review board. Adding a bit of awkward confusion, two of the actors froze the last moment of the final scene before intermission straight through intermission to the opening of the next act. No one knew when to applaud and when to stretch...
...course, traditions die hard. Even as a self-proclaimed gender policewoman, I still tend to blurt out "Freshman Week" or "Freshman Dean's Office" if I am not being careful. Dean Lewis does have a point that "first-year" might sound a little awkward, and that there might be a better substitute to the offending word. Or maybe "freshman" is just one of those words in the "who would want to be one anyway?" category--like "garbageman" and "hitman"--that even the most strident p.c. advocates are content to leave alone...
...What we really like is the zaniness and warmth of Colombo, the character he plays on TV," said John J. Abbott '96, the Lampoon's outgoing ibis. "He's bumbling, he's awkward, but he gets the job done, and a lot of us aspire to be like that...