What is meant by: "She has too many feet and hands"? [closed]

What is the meaning of: She has too many feet and hands?

Context: "A tall, awkward girl in a back seat, who seemed to have too many feet and hands"

Solution 1:

The expression "too many hands and feet" means that someone or something is awkward or self-conscious. Here it appears in an elocution guide from 1920:

So very often it is revealed that a boy who talks or reads indirectly, monotonously, and raucously, can be got to read or talk freely, easily, and pleasantly when induced by some means or other to overlook the fact that people are looking at him or that he has too many hands and feet and that he is for the most part a good deal of a gawk and a clown.

That said, while this isn't a common expression, I have found enough examples that this expression has a life of its own in its reference to social or speech anxiety. Here are a couple of more results.

William Archer, in the book Poets of the Younger Generation (1902), uses the phrase "too many hands and feet" to describe a poem made awkward by too much symbolically going on. In particular, the hands in the poem have to carry so much (no metrical comments appear here):

Here we have too much sun and moon and too many hands and feet.

And in an article in The Book Buyer (1902) the phrase again appears to refer to awkwardness on the part of a character who is described as heroic but ends up speaking or acting clumsily:

We don't want an author to tell us at the first what a grand and truly noble man the hero is, how finished and cultured and how superlative in every degree, and then to consider his work done; to desert the poor fellow and let him wander clear through the book with too many hands and feet and an always unready tongue.

Here is an entry in The Saturday Evening Post, February 1, 1919, p. 11, where having "too many hands and feet" seems associated with being tongue-tied or nonverbally anxious in a crowd:

A girl has about as much use for a tongue-tied shy man as she has for a secondhand typhoid germ or a last year's fashion plate. Especially if he's cursed with too many hands and feet - the way I always am when I get into a crowd like this.

Here is a bit from L.M. Montgomery's novel Emily's Quest (1927) (she also wrote Anne of Green Gables), which refers to a man having less self-consciousness in social circles:

He had even acquired certain fundamental rules of social etiquette and learned not to have too many hands and feet.

Here's a bit on cheaters in the Metropolitan (1935), p. 358, corresponding with certain tells. (My guess: the person is looking at their hands and feet a lot, as if counting them.):

Further, the cheater is restless, uneasy, fears detection and usually has too many hands and feet.

Finally, lest this expression seem merely a relic of the early 20th century, here's a reviewer from 2011 describing Juliet in an all-male production of Romeo and Juliet:

When we meet Juliet, she seems caught right on the cusp between ugly duckling and swanhood. She has bee-stung lips, a deep but not unpleasant voice, and far too many hands and feet.