vergüenza ajena

What it means

A wedding photographer in Madrid lines up the guests for a group shot. He shouts jokes nobody laughs at and makes the grandmother stand on a chair. He thinks it is going well. Somewhere at table nine a cousin puts her face in her hands. That is vergüenza ajena: shame felt for what someone else does or says, while they go on doing it.

The RAE dictionary lists it under vergüenza as a fixed phrase and defines it in one line: shame felt for what others do or say. The other person does not have to notice, and usually does not. They do not have to be related to you either. Spanish speakers use the phrase as easily for a politician on television as for a brother-in-law at dinner. The verb is dar or sentir: me da vergüenza ajena, it gives me someone else’s shame.

In Spain there is also a colloquial single word, alipori, which the RAE defines simply as vergüenza ajena. Across most of Latin America the phrase changes its first word and becomes pena ajena.

Where it comes from

Vergüenza comes from Latin verecundia, modesty or a sense of shame, according to the RAE. Ajena is the feminine of ajeno, someone else’s. The phrase is ordinary Spanish grammar, a noun and an adjective, with no recorded coiner and no single first attestation.

Spanish Wiktionary quotes a 1977 issue of the magazine Triunfo, in which a critic says the film Rocky can produce vergüenza ajena in certain sequences. It also records equivalents in neighbouring languages: Portuguese vergonha alheia, Catalan vergonya aliena.

How to use it

Me dio tanta vergüenza ajena que cambié de canal. (It gave me so much secondhand embarrassment that I changed the channel.) Casual Spanish, as said in Spain.

The reunion tour was forty minutes of vergüenza ajena, and the band seemed to be having the time of their lives. Casual English with the Spanish phrase kept whole as a borrowed label.

What it is not

Pena ajena. The feeling is the same; the word for shame changes with the map. The Diccionario de americanismos records pena meaning shame or shyness in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia and Paraguay, and pena ajena in Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba and Colombia. The RAE’s first sense of pena is great sadness; its shame sense carries American labels only.

Fremdschämen. The German word is a reflexive verb that Duden marks colloquial and first printed in its spelling dictionary in 2009: you shame yourself on someone’s behalf. The Spanish phrase is a noun that usually arrives as the subject of dar, so the shame is given to you by the other person’s act. Spanish also had the phrase in print by 1977, decades earlier.

In the wild

• Vergüenza, created by Álvaro Fernández Armero and Juan Cavestany, Movistar+, 2017 to 2020: a wedding photographer who never notices the cringe he causes, and his wife, who does.
• Los Jaivas, “Vergüenza ajena”, on Palomita blanca, 1992: a bolero written as the theme of the soap opera seen inside the film.
• Triunfo, 1977, quoted in Spanish Wiktionary: a review saying Rocky produces vergüenza ajena in some sequences.