Light On Dark Water

Sometimes I get tired of being a curmudgeon regarding various current phenomena in the continual flux that is the English language. I'm pretty sure my wife is tired of it, too–of hearing me grumble, for instance, about how annoying the word "iconic" has become in recent years. (But then I don't think she pays much attention, either.) I did a whole post on that one a couple of years ago: Worst Use of "Iconic". And complained about a couple of others in Further Linguistic Defeats. Any living language is always changing, but with English being so widely spoken, and with so wide and rapid a diffusion of these changes, the flux is extreme now.  

But I'm not always negative, and I'm here today to give my approval to the use of the verb "cringe" as an adjective. ("Cringe" is also a noun, but it seems to be rarely used. My unabridged dictionary defines it as "a cringing.") It refers to the phenomenon in which one is embarrassed on behalf of someone else: as in "He tried to sing 'Color My World' at the wedding reception, and it was so cringe." As I was writing this I came up with several more examples, but am stopping with that one, because everyone knows what I mean, and the sensation is very unpleasant. 

The essence of cringe is that the person doing the cringe thing is unaware of it; he should be embarrassed but is not. If the groom trips and falls on the way down the aisle at the wedding, it isn't cringe–he is embarrassed and we feel sorry for him. If he sings "Color My World" badly but thinks he's doing fine, it's cringe. We feel sorry for him, but mostly we feel embarrassed for him, and in our minds are begging for him to stop, because the feeling we have is normally quite painful. The spectator who enjoys the situation is cruel,  and probably hates the person doing the cringe thing. 

There are serviceable and grammatically conventional ways of making this point: "cringe-making," "cringe-inducing," and so forth, but they're a bit clumsy. "Cringey" doesn't really do the job, at least to my ear, as it seems to refer to the person who is cringing, not to behavior which causes others to cringe. "Cringe" is more effective–quick and sharp. 

If you read the posts I linked to above, you might complain about my complaining about the use of the noun "cliché" as an adjective while putting the verb "cringe" to work similarly. Well, in somewhat weak defense, I note that "cliché" has a perfectly good adjectival form of long-standing  use: "clichéd." It doesn't even require that we pronounce another syllable, which would interfere with our very busy 21st century lifestyle.

So what, you say? How does that make a usage like "that's so cringe" acceptable? It doesn't, really, by any sort of consistent rule. I confess to inconsistency. Still, as an adjective, "cringe" seems to me to add something useful and colorful to the language, whereas "cliché" as an adjective does not; it just sounds sloppy and ignorant.