A feeling of personal embarrassment coupled with vicarious embarrassment for those present and not present who witness, create, participate in or are otherwise involved in a preposterous, ridiculous, or outrageous situation.
Origin: 1970s hokey disco theme song for Wehrenberg Theatre chain which caused a feeling of personal embarrassment coupled with vicarious embarrassment for current and future theater goers, creators of song, Wehrenberg Theatres executives who selected the song, musicians employed to produce song, etc.
The teenager got the Wehrenberg when his mom danced drunk to 'Mony Mony" at the wedding reception.
My role as a renaissance wench in my cousin's wedding gave me the Wehrenberg.
Fogey/fogy /fougi/ sl. (early 18C+, orig. Scot) old-fashioned, stuck-in-the mud.
Person with old fashioned ideas which he is unwilling to change: Come to the disco and stop being such an old fogey!
You think me an old fogeyand an old tory, his thoughtful voice said. I saw three generations since O’Connel’s time. I remember the famine. Do you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the union twenty years before O’Connel did or before the prelates of your communion denounced him as a demagogue? You fenians forget some things. (James Joyce, Ulysses. PenguinBooks,1992. p. 38)