embarrassment

The feeling can be mild, even pleasant. Judith Martin, writing on teasing in The Washington Post in 1998, describes the "pleasurable embarrassment" a gentle tease aims for and sets it apart from "real embarrassment", which should end the joke at once. The word covers that whole range, from a flattered flush to humiliation, so an adjective often has to say which.

Here the word names the culprit rather than the feeling, and it usually takes an article and to: an embarrassment to this family, an embarrassment to the firm. The to-phrase names whoever is shamed, and that may be a person, an institution or a whole city, as when a brazen baggage heist was an embarrassment to Paris. An adjective can widen the circle: a national embarrassment.

Plenty becomes the problem here, and the word nearly always sits in the frame an embarrassment of plus a plural noun: an embarrassment of riches, of volunteers, of qualified squad leaders. The phrase is usually admiring, but the hindrance can be real. Collier's in 1914 reports a committee that could hardly pick a program from so many volunteers. Nothing shameful is involved; the trouble is the choosing.

Here the trouble is in the mind, not the face, and no blush is required. James Ridgway's A Dictionary of Literary Conversation (1785) warns that commentaries "lead the reader into greater embarrassments", meaning tangles of uncertainty. The plural comes naturally, since each embarrassment is a particular difficulty. In prose like Ridgway's, read the word as perplexity rather than social discomfort.

A clinician's use with no feeling in it: the organ is embarrassed, not the patient. It pairs with an adjective naming the affected system, as in respiratory or circulatory embarrassment, and reports function that disease has compromised. Readers new to medical writing should not hear shame in it. It says only that breathing, circulation or a similar process is struggling against an obstacle.