Many of the problems with awkwardness arise not from its phenomenological qualities, but from our conception of it as attaching to individuals or specific issues rather than the interaction between individuals and social norms.

The rules of etiquette reduce the cognitive burden of everyday life; because of them, in social situations, “the work of deciding what to do happens elsewhere”

scripts are better understood not as guiding individual behavior, but as coordinating group behavior.

One way anxiety and awkwardness relate is via “social anxiety”: anxiety about the prospect of awkwardness. We anticipate it; we dread it; we do what we can to avoid it.

The horror of awkwardness is partly the feeling of isolation, of feeling like we’re uniquely marked out and alienated by our social ineptitude. The promise of awkward comedy is that we’re not. We can read this either as benign reassurance, or a more malign type of schadenfreude.

Moments of awkwardness can make us feel somehow “wrong” or “misfit,” and we can view our inability to enact a social script as a reflection on us—that we have failed, or fallen short, or are somehow socially inept or defective.

And it cuts both ways— if awkwardness prevents premature consensus, it also inhibits the kinds of conversations that would allow us to reach a mature, informed consensus down the line.

When we engineer a concept, we gain access to a whole new set of resources associated with that expanded meaning

As issues are moralized, the scripts governing how we negotiate them likewise shift, and we can be caught off-guard, or uncertain about the norms that apply, during the transition. There’s room here for both genuine ambiguity, issues that are not determinately moral or personal, or that occupy both spheres, and epistemic uncertainty, where there