The word 'wince' is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to describe a physical reaction to something that causes a person to be uncomfortable, such as pain, fear, or a sudden unpleasant emotion. For example, "He winced as the needle pierced his skin."
Hearing such avowals earnestly delivered by the besotted title character of "Charlie Countryman" to his tough Romanian dream girl, you don't know whether to laugh or to wince.
But the best was probably the full-page advert for Barcelona-branded Japanese knives – "the best team on the pitch, the best team in the kitchen" – in which Cristian Tello cuts mushrooms, Pedro Rodríguez slices tomatoes and Víctor Valdés is busy taking a meat cleaver to a courgette in a picture that makes you wince in anticipation and screams "opening scene of Casualty" at you.
It made you wince because you knew what he meant.
"I've seen one or two broken legs in going on fifty years in the game," he said, "but not one made me really wince.
Was using the tragedy of his son's short life a good defence of the NHS or do people wince?
Party strategists wince at the results of the ethnic minority British election study, which analysed the 2010 figures.
He begins with John Law, whose recommendation that France introduce paper money to pay off the national debt produced a great boom followed by great bust, and then proceeds to trace economists' understanding of cyclical booms and busts from Adam Smith to chaos theory.Pedants will wince at some of his more egregious theoretical simplifications.
No less an authority than the editor of Wisden the bible of world cricket writes that "by early 2004, England had become something close to the pariahs of the cricketing world…regarded by the other countries with head-shaking despair, if not outright loathing .Both Mr Major and Sir Tim wince slightly at that description, which they regard as excessive.
A lot of the measures over which he has presided as home secretary draconian anti-terrorist laws following the Omagh bombing, powers against loosely defined forms of "anti-social behaviour", proposals to relax the laws of evidence to make it easier to seize the assets of suspected criminals—have made civil libertarians wince.
And though some Christians may wince at the words "Happy Holidays", it doesn't quite add up to religious persecution.
