The word cringe has been around for a while. The first modern use of the noun was in the 1570s and, as a verb, in the thirteenth century, but it had a lot of different definitions and spellings before that. Throughout Middle and Old English, it was attested as crinchen, crenchen, crengen, crencan, crencgan, crengan, and crenge, and meant "bend", "bow", "turn", and "cause to fall". It traces to the Proto-Germanic reconstruction kenk, or "curl up", and ultimately derives from Proto-Indo-European greng, "to turn". Recently, cringe has been adopted in meme culture to indicate disgust toward something, usually a fandom of some sort. This shift began in 2013, and has resulted in both renewed usage of the word in literature over time and increased Google search frequency for it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. This year, I graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government and Linguistics. There, I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote a thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy, magna cum laude. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy philosophy, trivia, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
Archives
May 2022
TAGS |