Douche Bag: A History

As any good wordsmith knows, words have histories. (This is important to keep in mind if you ever time travel because words that we use today may have different meanings to the people in the time to which you travel.) For example, we use the word "nothing" today, and I'm sure you all know the meaning, but whenever you see the word "nothing" in a piece written by Shakespeare it is basically guaranteed that he was talking about vagina.

Nothing's history is very dirty indeed.

Since the definition of a word changes over time, people of differing generations may have a different idea of what a term actually means, and how it is being used. This was the confusion that I created over dinner at a semi-nice restaurant with my family.

Now, it needs to be known that, with my family, it is not dinner table talk unless parts of it would need to be bleeped from cable television. However, we are normally at least PG-13 when we are out in public. This was not one of those times.

It all started with me calling my daddy a douche bag. I am not sure what he said or did, exactly, that caused me to utter the word, but it's not important. What is important is that this turned into a very heated discussion over the definition of the term.

If you have ever had the pleasure of viewing this video about a guy who is way too obsessed with his Jagerbombs, then you have a pretty solid grasp on the current definition of the term "douche bag".

If not, here is my depiction of such a person:

Spikey hair, fake tan (which is made more noticeable by the raccoon eyes caused by the brainless guy's tanning goggles), and an Ed Hardy T-Shirt - which, for some reason beyond that which I can fathom, looks like a rock-hard cock and giant hairy balls (this shirt actually exists!).

Thanks, Breezy, for guest-doodling the actual cock and balls!

After giving my parents a quick explanation of what I meant by the word, my daddy replied with the history of the word.

So, to paraphrase, Daddy said that a douche bag was pretty much one of those red rubber hot/cold packs that you see parents putting on their child's head when the child is sick in movies set back in the day. Only, instead of being filled with water and heated or cooled for the comfort of the user, it was filled with some sort of liquid and used as a vaginal douche. Daddy even said that his mother used to hang hers on the door in the bathroom, as if it were such a commonly used device that there was no need to be ashamed of the damned thing.

(And, to make it all that much more legit, I found an actual picture of what he was talking about!)

The debate about the term was (of course) loud and probably obnoxious, because that's how our family dinners always are, and it wasn't until the end of the history lesson that we looked over to see this:

A bunch of old folks giving us death stares from across the restaurant. They had probably heard the whole douche bag debate! (Not to mention the fact that the old woman had probably just used one before dinner...)