Why do we feel awkward? Flashcards
awkward (adjective), awkwardness (noun)
feeling uncomfortable, self-conscious or embarrassed in a social situation where something isn’t quite right.
do you ever feel awkward? Sometimes. I remember always feeling very awkward watching TV with my parents if there was an explicit love scene. You know, people canoodling. Oh yes, me too! And that feeling of awkwardness is what we are looking at in today’s 6 Minute English, and how it is all connected to social rules.
implicit / tacit
not spoken or written down, but still understood.
They are not written down anywhere. They are unspoken but understood.
it would be very awkward if you broke that social rule by asking them about, oh I don’t know, how much money they earned.
How do we understand what the implicit social rules are that govern our behaviour?
social rules
the way we behave in society in particular situations so that we can live together peacefully.
it would be very awkward if you broke that social rule by asking them about, oh I don’t know, how much money they earned.
How do we understand what the implicit social rules are that govern our behaviour? They’re so implicit. They’re so almost invisible - yet we all obey them - i.e. they’re massively powerful that the only way to get at them, because you couldn’t use an MRI brain scanner or a microscope… What’s the tool you would use to illuminate the social rules that actually govern our lives?
to govern
to rule, to control.
How do we understand what the implicit social rules are that govern our behaviour? They’re so implicit. They’re so almost invisible - yet we all obey them .
He says that they govern our behaviour, they govern our lives – this means that they ‘control’ our lives. They ‘rule’ our lives.
to illuminate
to make something easier to understand, to clarify.
This means a way of shining a metaphorical light on them to see what they are.
How do we understand what the implicit social rules are that govern our behaviour? They’re so implicit. They’re so almost invisible.
What’s the tool you would use to illuminate the social rules that actually govern our lives?
to breach (a rule)
to break (a rule).
How do we understand what the implicit social rules are that govern our behaviour?
What’s the tool you would use to illuminate the social rules that actually govern our lives?
One way to find out about a rule is to break it. Another word for ‘break’ when we’re talking about rules is breach and breaching experiments were used to learn about social rules.
You breached the social rule on purpose. So a classic one – people would go into the Metro, the underground railway – Tube – and there’d be only one person sitting in a carriage. You would go and sit next to that person. And if that led to awkwardness or discomfort, where the person got off the tube stop immediately, you had discovered a social rule.
we don’t want to breach any rules
