the awkward age

awkward age

The period between childhood and adulthood, which many find to be the most difficult to navigate emotionally. I always cringe when I look back at the stuff I wrote during my awkward age, so full of angst and self-importance.
See also: age, awkward
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

the awkward age

adolescence.
See also: age, awkward
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary

the ˈawkward age

the period when some young people have difficulties as they approach adult life: ‘Gary seems such a quiet boy.’ ‘Oh, he’s just at that awkward age — he’ll soon grow out of it.’
See also: age, awkward
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary
See also:
  • awkward age
  • find true north
  • north
  • recoil at the thought (of someone or something)
  • recoil
  • recoil at the sight
  • recoil at the sight (of someone or something)
  • worker
  • a fast worker
  • know (one's) way about
References in periodicals archive
At the awkward age of sixteen years, where we barely know ourselves, much less who we will be in several years time, a sizeable amount is spent so we can go to faraway lands, away from most of the people we know, immersing ourselves in a completely foreign culture.
In terms of the cultural zeitgeist, awkwardness has replaced irony as the default sensibility, argued Elif Batuman in a New Yorker essay titled "The Awkward Age" in September 2014.
At the awkward age of thirteen, Arnold's turn came to accept a page of newspaper from his teacher and write about anything in it that interested him.
well, detour ("philosophical memoir" wouldn't be far off the mark), we encounter this story: Cappello has been trying to read Henry James's The Awkward Age. "[L]onging to be seduced by awkwardness," she beats her way through the novel's thickets of circumlocution.
"Unworked and Unavowable: Community in The Awkward Age," exploring "the relation of speech-acts to community" (84), develops Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of La communaute desoeuvree, which Miller translates as the "unworked" community, to read the catachrestic aspect of language in The Awkward Age.
Nanda Brookenham's marriage prospects, in The Awkward Age, are severely restricted by the sexual knowledge to which she has been prematurely exposed according the Victorian mores of sexuality operative within the novel's fictive cadre.
Tippett--I do indeed know that the girl in the telegraph booth was from "In The Cage," and thanks for reminding us all that The Awkward Age, written at the end of this period, was another adolescent character study in which James seemed to try an end-run around the stage by presenting a play between book covers.
Among her numerous achievements is to embody, seemingly without effort, what Henry James called "the awkward age," that defining cusp between innocence and experience capable of impaling the unwary on emotions for which they don't fully possess the words.
This Season One DVD contains all 25 episodes as Angry Kid gets to grip with life at the awkward age between childhood and becoming a teenager.
95), 'modern morbidity' (in The Awkward Age) is 'like a publisher's blurb' (p.
At the awkward age of 17, I had bought the line that good manners, high SAT scores, and a small dress size would assure a lifetime's worth of happiness.
When she returns to Maisie and The Awkward Age, where 'the duplications and imitations are not a problem but the very source of meaning and identity' (p.
The whole world confirms to them that they are indeed poor, regrettably laboring through what is called "the awkward age." It is no wonder that teenagers like to run in packs, that they surround themselves with people as gawky and unformed as themselves.
In chapter three, the twin focus is on the preface's `delineation of the conflict between the logic of history and the logic of fiction' in relation to The Aspern Papers and The Awkward Age. For The Aspern Papers, `recovering the historic narrative in the preface and recovering it in the fiction establishes by implication the contrast between historic and aesthetic structures of reality'.
Where chapters are given to six novels, while The Awkward Age, The Ambassadors, 'The Turn of the Screw', and 'In the Cage' are included in the discussion, it may seem carping to complain about what is not there.