Kind Dr. Mollygrubs,

Today, my chauffeur drove me to the local feed store to purchase food for my prized racehorse, Spontaneous Wood. While at the store, a young man walked in. This was a sunny day, and understandably, he had sunglasses. However, he did not remove them from his face whilst indoors. In all my years, I had never seen such large sunglasses.& He also wore a large cross necklace, an Ed Hardy shirt, and had a fake tan.& Upon seeing this orange-skinned spectacle, my driver (he joined me in the store to carry the feed back to the car) whispered to me, "What a douche bag." I come to you, Dr. Mollygrubs, to ask for information on this unfortunate social phenomenon, the douche bag. Was there an evolution which led to it and will it be long-lived, or is the douche bag a blip on our cultural radar? Is there a difference between a tool and a douche bag, and which is worse? Possibly the most important question on this topic, do the increasing levels of douche-baggery have no limits?

I would have contacted you using the more traditional method, your web log, however my computer machine could not coerce the link into functioning correctly. Your understanding is appreciated.

Yours,
Geoff

Thank you for your inquiry, Geoff. I will deal with the last point first. It appears that by modifying the look of my web log I inadvertently disabled the comments. My apologies, dear readers. I will correct the matter as quickly as possible. [Edit: I have devised a temporary but unattractive solution for this problem. You may now post comments as you please.]

Now then. I shall provide for you a number of answers and insights, but first let us define our terms. The douche was invented in Egypt circa 3100 BC by a chronically disinterested prince who "misplaced" a game piece from his Senet board. He asked for help from the royal physician who believed the prince was making a pun (the full name of the game in Egyptian was zn.t n.t ḥˁb meaning the "game of passing") and therefor the physician refused to treat the prince, who eventually died of bowel obstruction. This sad prince's invention is a device used to introduce a stream of water into the body for medical or hygienic reasons, and the word may also refer to the stream of water that such a device dispenses. A douche-bag, therefore, is a bag that retains water for use in a douche. As you may know, the human body is composed of 60-70% water, making the term "douche-bag" a particularly appropriate pejorative. By referring to someone with this metaphor, you are saying, in essence, "Your vital bodily fluids are at beast fit to swish around someone's intestines and I certainly wish never to partake of that!" You are implying that the person is arrogant and obnoxious, but also harmless. Interestingly, according to Dr. William Long in his article Terms of Insult, the phrase is primarily assigned to men. I can only attribute this targeted designation to the douche's most common use by women to cleanse the vaginal canal, and to that even-more-common male malady, machismo, which renders a man's ego as vulnerable as a new born babe. To put it plainly, a man is more likely to feel threatened by such an insult, making it more fun to taunt him with it. Try it now and see what I mean.

Was there an evolution which led to it and will it be long-lived, or is the douche bag a blip on our cultural radar? There have always been douche-bags in this world. It may seem that humanity is constantly evolving and improving itself but, in reality, we have changed very little in the last few millennia. Instead of asshats with axes lording it over the sheepish masses, we now have asshats with guns doing the exact same thing. Instead of douches pestering their fellows to worship Mithra (the ancient Indic divinity born of a virgin in a stable on the winter solstice), we now have douches pestering their neighbors to worship some other guy born of a virgin in a stable in the dead of winter. You take my meaning. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Is there a difference between a tool and a douche bag, and which is worse? This question is a veritable Pandora's box of linguistic theory. It suffices to say that language is a fluid thing. The meanings of words are entirely subjective and definitions vary greatly from region to region. Pejorative and slang terms are especially prone to rapid evolution. They are the fruit flies of language. Consider that the term retarded, to refer to a person whose mental capacity is permanently weak, was originally used as a euphemism to avoid the pejorative senses of words like moronic, feebleminded, and half-witted. But it quickly grew to have a negative sense of its own. (It is worth noting that, in its own time, moron was a euphemism for the pejorative word idiot.) This same progression, from neutral to pejorative, is already happening with the words challenged and special, used in the same sense today. Language writer Steven Pinker calls this process "the euphemism treadmill." So, one person's tool is another person's douche-bag.

Rest assured, there is a limit. Douche-baggery growth follows an elegant S curve, trapped between two asymptotes. On the bottom we see that we can never quite reach zero douche-bags, and at the top we see that the number of douche-bags can never quite equal the total population. There will always be douche-bags, but so too will there always be individuals of the non-douche variety.

I hope I have been of some help to you, Geoff, and to all of you. Please feel free to send further inquires to mollygrubs@gmail.com or post in the comments section of any article.