If you are gauche, you do or say the socially wrong thing — not because you mean to be rude, but because you have not learned the unwritten rules, or you move through them clumsily. You might pay a compliment that lands as an insult, or laugh at the wrong moment. It is a fairly grown-up, slightly French-flavoured adjective; books and careful speakers use it more than friends in the playground. Though actually, gauche is not the same as shy, and not the same as rude. A shy person may know the rules and still freeze; a rude person may know them and ignore them. Gauche is closer to awkward manners. English borrowed it from French, where the same word also means “left” (the left hand). We took the “awkward” sense, not the “left” sense — so in English gauche never means the opposite of right.