Editor’s Note: Patrick is Yeah Right’s FIRST EVER guest contributor — so PLEASE show him all of your love and affection…OR ELSE! 🤬🤬🤬
Charlie Rose: What does ‘post-modern’ mean in literature?
David Foster Wallace: …It’s a very useful catch-all term because you say it and we all nod soberly as if we know what we’re talking about, and, in fact, we don’t.
Cringe, like the word ‘post-modernism,’ is used so often yet increasingly hard to describe the more that it is used. According to Merriam-Webster, its origins can be found in the 13th century, and, apparently, it is currently in the top 1% of words (and I believe it). The hashtag ‘cringe’ on TikTok alone will deliver you a seemingly endless onslaught of content that has been viewed a total of 18.5 billion times. Billion (in Dr. Evil voice).
The truth of the word and its common usage probably lies somewhere between the Wikipedia definition of ‘cringe comedy’ and the definition of the word that popped up almost a millennia ago. The definition of cringe comedy on Wikipedia still uses a quote from a 2013 Time article: “laughs derived from the awkwardness of social interaction and around people’s lack of self-awareness” (Susman). There is an element of second-hand embarrassment that this word took on, but originally it meant to recoil from a possible beating (“to shrink in fear or servility”). Somehow, the second definition is slightly closer to the way it is used nowadays: things that are truly cringe are assaulting, they pierce my soul.
(This is another problem. Merriam Webster has definitions for the verb cringe and definitions for the noun, the physical act of cringing. There needs to be a third category: adjective. Things are cringe. Fix this, dictionaries. Even Grammarly is mad at me, what the hell.)
The problem with this Wikipedia definition is that it is referencing The Office, Parks and Recreation, and other ludicrously popular television shows; the definition should be trying to encapsulate the feeling you get when you watch a stranger poorly acting out their wildest, most embarrassing fantasies and fandoms. It is the pain you experience watching someone try to be funny and fail, and it’s not just a swing and a miss, the person doesn’t care about the ball and uses the bat as a cane and does an acapella show-tune.
Simultaneously, it’s the pain you experience when you see someone being unbelievably sincere and emotional and it is impossible not to laugh — the absurdity is overwhelming. You might have cringed at my sincere use of a David Foster Wallace epigraph. I get it. It’s pretentious and embarrassing.
Cringe now bleeds into the quotidian, strays away from social media. Your old high-school classmate is into crypto and NFT’s: cringe. See that person over there? They’re wearing converse high-tops with the spikes on them like they’re Sid Vicious or something: cringe. I like poetry: cringe. Here returns what Susman called a “lack of self-awareness”. But ay, there’s the rub! Cringe on TikTok and Twitter, and in more art in general, is now self-aware cringe. “You don’t understand,” they cackle and scream, stroking their chins ironically, “I was trying to be cringe!!”. And honestly, who cares. If they wanted to make me cringe and they were successful, isn’t that just an effective piece of art? Good on them, I now feel like a ‘normal’ person (even though, as I have said, I am also cringe).
And when it comes to the inherent dichotomy of perceived normalcy and what is awkward or cringe, I am of two minds. First, everyone is cringe. We all do things that are cringy, and I think that a horrifically embarrassing person lives deep down inside all of us. Second, I see some shit on TikTok that makes me want to shrink inside of myself like Osmosis Jones and hit self-destruct. There are things on the internet that turn me into a puddle of quaking sympathy and pity. So who knows, maybe there are two wolves inside me and they’re both cringe. I’d like to think so.
Maybe, just maybe, being cringe is transcendental. What one perceives as a lack of self-awareness is true self-awareness, a zen state of mind only reached by the bravest, most honest souls imaginable. Maybe it is a sacrifice of the self to one’s self, to one’s inner-most desires. Hmmm…probably not. It’s probably some dude alone in his dorm room, pretending to hit on a girl at a bar with the confidence of a Roman emperor while Playboi Carti blasts in the background.