English actually has different languages for 12 year olds and adults. Vocabulary like “cringe” is fine for kids, but makes you come off as judgmental and unpleasant when used in a more formal context.

I keep hoping that word will eventually eat itself.

The only way that will happen is if adults start using it. Next time you meet a 12 year old who says something is "cringe", tell them they are "cringe" for using the word "cringe".

I wonder if this will continue to be a generational thing, I still have a smattering of eighties Valley-speak because that was pretty popular in my teen years. Maybe people who are in their early teens now will be as likely to call something they don't like "cringe" in their fifties as I am to call something "bogus".

It's fine to use the word "cringe", but it might be cringe to use the phrase "it's cringe".

Find a better word for that feeling you get when you hear fingernails on chalkboards and we can use that instead on this formal Hacker News setting.

> Find a better word for that feeling you get when you hear fingernails on chalkboards

Aroused?

>it seems needy and submissive more than anything.

Never before did the idea of being reborn as a woman in Japan in a next life sound that bad.

The funny thing is, Japanese women don't really come off that way, it's just how they talk and they are quite adept at achieving their goals with their "feminine" language. One gets the impression that many of the Western men who learn Japanese from their wives and girlfriends are actually trying to emulate this ability to manipulate their world through softer / more social language and achieve similar levels of success, but it doesn't really work for them and seems sociopathic instead. Hence, the cringe.

Interesting. Would "simping" be a better term than sociopathic? Obviously that's not necessarily what's going on, but Japanese is already so contextual, I imagine it's difficult to separate/rationalize how someone speaks the way they do from the why.

That’s not a bad way to describe it.