@ArrJaySketch 
German actually has a word for that: fremdschamen. It’s that feeling of embarrassment-by-proxy you get when you see a friend make a complete fool of themselves.

Newbie Dash officially made “Cringe” the most obnoxiously overused buzzword in history.

@northern haste  
I think a better term for cringe would be “vicarious embarrassment”. It’s a form of empathy, where a person imagines themselves in the situation that another person is actively doing; the observer then imagines themselves in the situation, and it would feel embarrassing.
 
I’ve been musing on this off and on for a while. I thinking asking folks why something embarrasses them might help more than asking them why something is cringy. Mostly, I think some people tolerate embarrassment far better than others, and some people have very different ideas of what’s embarrassing in the first place.
 
For instance, someone shouting in a crowded room to get everyone’s attention might be embarrassing for some people, but other people live for that. Or worse, someone telling a joke poorly and loudly in a crowded room might make some people cringe, but I know folks who just don’t care. Some people think singing loudly and badly in public is embarrassing (thus cringy when someone else does it). I know some people who just think any singing in public is embarrassing.
 
Like, when Spike is supposed to sing the Cloudsdale anthem and flubs it, there are some people who think that butchering a song well known to the audience would be terribly embarrassing, and thus those same people probably found Spike’s singing to be cringy. Someone could possibly find the situation embarrassing, but don’t feel a particularly strong empathetic link, thus not feeling the moment was cringy. (And of course, people who didn’t think it was embarrassing, so again, no cringe.)

@palettepony895 
@northern haste
 
If you have to explain the cringe, you become part of the cringe.

@palettepony895 
Honestly the explanations I’ve gotten don’t help

Hey, give Quibble some credit; he actually explains why it made him cringe. 
Everyone else just says “CRINGY!!!!” for no reason and that’s what ticks me off.

you don’t have to go very far to cringe at a convention

[sheep-like bleating]

This is an accurate image representing what Patton Oswalt does on Twitter. Rainbow Dash is also an accurate image representing my reaction to his tweets.