maladroit

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The Word of the Day for December 26 is: 

maladroit   \mal-uh-DROYT\   adjective
     : lacking skill, cleverness, or resourcefulness in 
handling situations : inept

Example sentence:
     Liz's friends marvel that anyone as skillful as she is at 
managing an accounting office can be so maladroit when it comes 
to keeping track of her personal finances.

Did you know?
     To understand the origin of "maladroit," you need to put 
together some French (or at least 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, 
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.