To understand the origin of
maladroit, you need to put together some Middle French and Old French building blocks. The first is the word
mal, meaning "bad," and the second is the phrase
a droit, meaning "properly." You can parse the phrase even further into the components
a, meaning "to" or "at," and
droit,
meaning "right, direct, or straight." Middle French speakers put those pieces together as
maladroit
to describe the clumsy among them, and English speakers borrowed the
word intact back in the 17th century. Its opposite, of course, is
adroit, which we adopted from the French in the same century.
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