Vicarishame

If you ever felt embarrassed for someone else, even though you are not the one who did something wrong, you know what I'm talking about. Vicarishame happens when you witness someone say something incredibly stupid, outright lie, being rude to others, or doing something else that you know is wrong. You are ashamed for them, vicariously. For example, I experience this type of embarrassment every time I watch Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show interact with Trump supporters who do not realize how easily they get into his logical traps.

In Russian, we call this type of embarrassment "Spanish shame," apparently because Spanish was one of the first European languages that came up with an exact expression for it - "Vergüenza ajena." German and Finnish also have precise compound words for it, loosely translated as "shame for the stranger."

Today's kids call it secondhand shame or secondhand embarrassment. I think we need a better one word for it, so I came up with vicarishame. It can be contracted to vi-shame once it becomes a part of the vernacular. Here's my proposed definition:

Vicarishame (vi-shame) - feeling of vicarious or secondhand embarrassment a person experiences for a wrong action committed not by the person but someone else. Happens often in empathetic decent people. Is usually accompanied by face palm.

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The challenge is long over, but I liked my word so much that I decided to continue using it by writing a series of stories about the situations where the concept applies and can be illustrated. I will be using this story as an index for the subsequent ones. Here's the first one:

Here's the second one, and I will be using the facepalming Jesus as a cover picture for all of them from now on: