New turtle on campus

Surely the world owes the unknown creators of the awkward turtle several rounds of huzzahs for they have effectively introduced a versatile and discursive element to youth culture. The awkward turtle, easily recreated in your own home by placing one palm on top of the other, palmdown, and wiggling the thumbs in the style of a trapped, hard-backed reptile, is slightly more than a colloquial manual gesture. Rather, it is a tool of empowerment that recognizes, then purges embarrassing, bewildering, disconcerting, perplexing and inopportune moments from the collective memory of a group of folks. This allows you to a) mock it and b) move on.

Just what constitutes an awkward situation? I turn to the authoritative online reference, Urban Dictionary, for the answer:

1.) "As you hug your ex, you do the awkward turtle behind his back."

2.) "Oh my god, so I was talking to Becky about STDs and I forgot she had syphilis..."

Despite its apparent ubiquity, nobody over the age of 23 seems to have ever heard of this. I asked senior Megan Hanford about her opinion of the awkward turtle. "What is that?" she said, her eyes getting larger with curiosity. (Could she have had high hopes for what I was about to say? I'd venture to say no.) So I explained it to her, told her I was writing a column and asked if I could quote her. She said, "Sure." I'd forgotten what she had said. Would she repeat herself for me? "Say something witty," I told her. "OK. I think that the awkward turtle is an interesting thing that I wish had been around a few years ago." I blinked slowly twice. "That wasn't funny," I deadpanned. I may have infuriated her, but junior Kenton Stalder had been listening in and invoked that sacred and distracting vertebrate with magnificent timing. We laughed … and then I found $20.

Do the academics have anything to say about the awkward turtle? You bet they don't, so allow me to put words in their mouths. Famous post-structuralist dead dude Michel Foucault said of discourse, ""[I]n every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its power and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality." Ah, so we have plenty of words for all the things we expect in the world, but we look away at the stuff we don't want to talk about, like farting in a public bathroom.

Let me explain. When you have to go to the bathroom in the middle of something, you will announce that you're going to visit the ladies' room, (a label which serves to distract from the fact that when you get there, you will squat on the toilet to do something very un-ladylike), and as you answer nature's call, you may unexpectedly pass gas (Chipotle now seems like a bad choice for lunch), which will almost certainly invent a tough situation for the poor girls attending to their hair or makeup at the sinks. (Forget you, sufferer of flatulence, you're just going to hide in the stall until everyone leaves.) Should I, as the girl touching up her eyeliner, guffaw with sincere juvenility or press my lips together as I ignore this hilarious incident of butt burping for fear of judgment? I have the answer. I will pull out the awkward turtle and empower, nay, enshrine this classic moment with no more than a whisper.

The awkward turtle is actually a proud step forward for humanity. Historically, people have gone out of their way to deal with awkward parts of life. For example, the Western toilet was designed to be the least awkward way to do your business. It's downright classy.

Andrew Stein of The Brown Herald Daily put it quite eloquently last year saying "we like to label awkwardness because 1) we're old enough to recognize and mock it and yet 2) young enough that we're not doing anything so important as to have our awkwardness actually matter." We need this improvisational creature very, very badly. It's a sign of strength to call ourselves out. If you ignore it, will it not go away? No, like your mom after Thanksgiving … because she's so fat she … oh boy. Awkward turtle?

Nandini Jammi is a sophomore English major. She can be reached at jammin@umd.edu.