The word for today is…

maladroit (adjective):

: lacking adroitness : inept

Source : Merriam -Webster

Etymology : Maladroit is perhaps an awkward fit for casual speech—outside of the occasional Weezer album title, one most often encounters it in formal writing—but you can remember its meaning by breaking it down into its French building blocks. The first is the word mal, meaning “badly,” which may be familiar from English words including malaise (“a vague sense of mental or moral ill-being”) and malodorous (“having a bad odor”). The second is adroit, meaning “having or showing skill, cleverness, or resourcefulness in handling situations.” Middle French speakers put those pieces together as maladroit to describe the clumsy and incompetent among them, and English speakers borrowed the word intact. We’d adopted adroit from them a short time before.

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David is a retired surgeon originally from London who came to New Zealand twenty-seven years ago after being delayed in Singapore for thirteen years on leaving the UK. He was coerced into studying Latin...