FOR many proud South Koreans, it was a cringe-inducing sight, all the worse for being beamed around the world: as a rapidly weakening global economy sucked South Korea down with it, the country's politicians brawled and scuffled.
To prove it, I even bought a few CDs.The last song of the night was a cringe-inspiring cover of the Bee Gees' classic "Stayin' Alive", half-shouted in falsetto by a man resembling an Albanian truck driver.
Petraeus gives many of these airborne, progress-on-the-march tours to visiting congressmen, journalists, and academics, and there was a cringe-inducing quality to some of his recitations as he skimmed above the country at an altitude of a thousand feet.
All this Australia offers is a cringe, but not a very cultural one.
The poor guy who was left down on one knee in the middle of a food court is a cringe-inducing sight.
In different hands, this might be a cringe-worthy premise: a vanilla cupcake wedged in among the down-and-out and the black-and-brown.
"Well, fear is a cringing sort of thing, where you don't know what to do or where to turn," Mr. Johnson said.
The best of these moments is a cringe-inducingly authentic garage-band cover of Adam and the Ants' unforgettable (though not for lack of trying) hit "Ant Music".
There is a cringe-worthy scene in the book on his TriBeCa roof deck, the morning after his raucous 34th birthday party, which featured a performance by the rappers Naughty by Nature.
The arrival of a Broadway musical that ridicules their religion, produced by the creators of the scathingly satirical television show "South Park," is proving to be a cringe-worthy moment for many Mormons.
