Is there a word for feeling embarrassed for someone else?

It could be watching a shitty band that are under the delusion they are great. Or having someone at your table torturing everyone with boring stories and stale jokes and being oblivious that everyone’s eyeballs are mentally rolling into the back of their head.

What made me think of this was that I listened to an interview of Richard Dawkins meeting with this fundamentalist christian woman. They were discussing evolution and I had a hard time listening to the whole thing. Her answers and rebuttals were so ignorant and yet she was so sure of herself that I was embarrassed for her to the point of physical discomfort.

Is there a word for that feeling?

The young ’uns call it “cringe” (or did, three years ago):

To cusper Sydne, 27, a freelance designer, cringe means anything that’s humiliating. “Cringe is the feeling of second-hand embarrassment for something that someone else is posting or doing or saying,” she says. “It’s almost like a gagging feeling mixed with pity — ‘yikes…’ is a good way to describe it,” she says.

Vicarious embarrassment, secondhand embarrassment, empathetic embarrassment, third-party embarrassment, Spanish shame, or Fremdscham.

Link.

mmm

On Reddit (and SDMB) the phrase “face palm” is common. It can work as a hyphenated word — face-palm.

It used to be a fairly common idiom, and I think isn’t yet totally obsolete, to say that you “blushed for” somebody else embarrassing themselves.

Tolstoy in Anna Karenina:

I tend to go with watching and saying a loud “Well, that’s just a shame”

ala’ Jerry Seinfeld

Unfortunate works too.

The particular phrasing used by young 'uns (just saying something is “cringe”) is new but the usage is not.

The term “Cringe comedy” is as old as I can remember, and is comedy that relies on exactly this feeling.

I can’t stand cringe comedy - which is why I don’t generally like Fawlty Towers, or the English version of The Office. But many like it.

Secondhand embarrassment for me. Cringe is a little harder to pin down but I think a cluelessness element is baked in. Like a lot of cringy humor in The Office or Arrested Development are characters being confidently wrong or inappropriate. “I’m afraid I just blew myself.”

Facepalm is simply “I can’t believe this shit” exasperation.

Yeah, “secondhand embarrassment” was the term I’d heard for this.

“Secondhand embarrassment” is not “a word.”

“Cringe” pretty well means what you are looking for. When I feel embarrassment for someone else, like on The Office or another show, I literally cringe: :grimacing: It’s the perfect description.

If it is in public, I sub vocalize a long drawn out version of the word eye.

I can take some of it, but some, e.g. Borat, are too much for me.

I have to re-watch this show.

Anyway, I agree that “cringe” is the word. “Ugh, that speech was so cringe.”

“Empathize” could be used if couched in the appropriate context.

Person A: “Good Lord, I’m so embarrassed!”

Person B: “Trust me, I empathize.”

German has a dedicated verb for exactly that: Fremdschämen. It’s a compound that literally means being ashamed for someone else and is quite a popular word nowadays in the social media subculture.

Not a single word, but I’ve said “I’m embarrassed for you”

I’m not young, but that’s what I call it.

But of course it does! :slight_smile:

I don’t remember that term before some time into the 2000s. I’m curious now about how far back we could trace it etymologically.

Simply this.