Imagine a dude who carefully assesses every aspect of his rhetoric to make sure it doesn’t sound close to something a naive, overly emotional or culturally unsophisticated person might say- in other words, he’s hyperfocused on not appearing adolescent or jejune.
I see "cringe" as the latest sneer word that the cool use to denigrate the uncool. It's a dismissive, judgmental, concise put-down that basically translates to: "this thing I don't like should be low status and I can say so because I'm high status".
Whether one can credibly declare something cringe depends on their rank. No one takes Outcast Ollie seriously when he says a show everyone likes is cringe, but if Popular Paulina declares it cringe, it's cringe. It's not like there's some objective definition of cringe out there. It's all status games. Popular Paulina doesn't spend time worrying about what is cringe though. She just makes a proclamation, and it is so.
Now, as a non-adolescent, I agree with you that it's a sign of immaturity and not worth caring about, but the word isn't for us. It's for those silly highschool cliques, so whatever.
Thanks for articulating my thoughts. It's a classic status hierarchy. X is cool and unknown. Then 'those people' started liking it, and it became mainstream. Now it's uncool and should be shunned.
>A little bit of this might be healthy but suppose this man internalizes the game so heavily that it begins to shape not just his rhetoric, but his beliefs as well.
And suppose this was your average oversocialized millennial; but I repeat myself.
Most people adopt beliefs which are locally high-status, and not ones that seem most true based on their wide reading of philosophy. It's the autistics who spend time arguing about which ones are high-status, because they can't sense the intangible.
I see "cringe" as the latest sneer word that the cool use to denigrate the uncool. It's a dismissive, judgmental, concise put-down that basically translates to: "this thing I don't like should be low status and I can say so because I'm high status".
Whether one can credibly declare something cringe depends on their rank. No one takes Outcast Ollie seriously when he says a show everyone likes is cringe, but if Popular Paulina declares it cringe, it's cringe. It's not like there's some objective definition of cringe out there. It's all status games. Popular Paulina doesn't spend time worrying about what is cringe though. She just makes a proclamation, and it is so.
Now, as a non-adolescent, I agree with you that it's a sign of immaturity and not worth caring about, but the word isn't for us. It's for those silly highschool cliques, so whatever.
Thanks for articulating my thoughts. It's a classic status hierarchy. X is cool and unknown. Then 'those people' started liking it, and it became mainstream. Now it's uncool and should be shunned.
Most recently, Rick and Morty is uncool.
cringe = "me no likey this" with fewer characters plus youngspeak
it's this generation's version of "lame"
>A little bit of this might be healthy but suppose this man internalizes the game so heavily that it begins to shape not just his rhetoric, but his beliefs as well.
And suppose this was your average oversocialized millennial; but I repeat myself.
Most people adopt beliefs which are locally high-status, and not ones that seem most true based on their wide reading of philosophy. It's the autistics who spend time arguing about which ones are high-status, because they can't sense the intangible.