My boyfriend and I were talking and it got onto the subject of douching. Weird I know but there it is. After talking about it for a few minutes I got to wondering how it became an insult. Any information on this would be great.
from a thread we did a few months ago. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=479482&highlight=douchebag
Was it ever a compliment?
You’re the bomb!
That was awfully douche-y of you.
I realize it’s an insult and, in fact, I use it all the time, but honestly being told you’re filled with liquid that you squirt into vaginas isn’t too much of an insult, from a guy’s viewpoint 
exactly! that’s why it doesn’t make sense
Lots of things about language don’t make logical sense, especially slang terms. The classic example is “bloody,” which is a fairly shocking insult in the UK – no one is entirely sure why.
Except that it’s being squirted into a presumably dirty vagina.
In common parlance, a bloody vagina isn’t always considered a good thing, either.
Despite strawberry-scented concoctions of the past, modern women are told that, for the most part, douching is bad for their vaginas. Douchebags tend to be guys that are harmful (or at least insulting) to vaginas. Makes sense.
When I was a kid, “lunch pail” and “door knob” were insults. As I recall, the implication was that the person was as dumb as said item. Perhaps douche-bag attained insult status because someone misunderstood how it worked - maybe they thought the bag contained the results of douching, much like a scumbag (condom) contains the scum (semen).
Douchey and douche as a verb which means “to mess up/ruin” have become popular in the past year, I’ve noticed.
I heard Will Ferrell use douchey on a recent SNL political special when he was playing GWB. I also heard Jensen Ackles use a different form of the word on Supernatural recently–i.e., “You [Sam] were supposed to take care of my car, not douche it up!”
That seems like a retrofitted explanation; douchebag has been an insult for quite a long time, while the popular recommendations against douching have mostly come about in the last oh, 20 years or so.
I think it’s more of a general “body fluids and hygiene are icky” thing. Asswipe, scumbag, snotrag, those have all been insults.
It’s starting to make sense now. Thanks guys!
Continuing in a similar vein - why is “dipstick” an insult? The only one I know is the thing for checking whether your car is low on oil.
Oh, I agree. It’s just why I support its usage (when, it could be argued, it’s just one in a long lone of vagina-related slurs). Anyway, I think Gawker is responsible for its resurgence (Jezebel weighs in here) .
As most women I know* become slightly more apt to do the “horizontal bop” when it’s that time of the month, I don’t think it’s really a bad thing either.
*only my lovely and wonderful wife at this time. But in the old days…
My WAG is that it’s a sanitized version of “dumbshit” or “dipshit”.
I’d guess because it’s a funny-sounding word (punchy consonants and assonant vowels). Probably the same reasons for insultifying “Nimrod,” the hunter king.
Correct. It appears around the late 1950s-early 1960s and is a more polite way of saying “dipshit,” much like people say frackin’/freakin’ for “fucking.”