The other day a friend of mine mentioned on Facebook that her son had come home from school with a difficult question. Not, “Why is the sky blue?” or even “Where do babies come from?” but a much trickier question.
“Mom,” he said, “what’s a douchebag?”
My daughter, Clementine, thought it was hysterical that someone wouldn’t know what a douchebag was. In fact, she was busy chortling away about the ignorance of some people when her father stopped her by saying, “Okay then: what is a douchebag?”
“Duh,” she replied. “A douchebag is obviously a bag of douche.”
After we stopped laughing, we tried to tell her the truth. My husband even told her a funny story about going into his grandmother’s bathroom and seeing the mysterious, frightening contraption hanging over the shower rod, next to the largest bra he’d ever seen and a pair of support hose as thick as inner tubes, but Clementine refused to believe him. For one thing, the whole concept of grandmothers being old is hard for her to grasp: her grandmother drinks margaritas and tubes down the river, and the scariest thing in her bathroom is the magnifying mirror. (Oh wait—maybe that’s just scary to me.) And then there’s the little fact that, as far as Clementine is concerned, the original meaning of “douchebag” is unimportant; all anyone needs to know about it nowadays is that it is an insult of the lowest sort, on par with saying that “you look like the kind of guy who has a Fedora in his closet.”
She’s right, of course. (About both “douchebag” and the fedora.) When it comes to insults, the true meaning of a word doesn’t really matter: it’s what it means to the giver (and, of course, the recipient) that’s important. When I was in seventh grade the worst thing you could call a guy was a “pud.” To this day I have no idea what pud means, but I am willing to bet that if I were to run into one of my male classmates from 1980 and call him a “pud” to his face, he would take offense. He might even fight me over it.
I always suspected that “pud” was a made-up word—something some clever seventh grader (or, more likely, some clever seventh grader’s even cleverer older sibling) came up with as a way to insult and annoy someone. And it worked. It worked so well that soon not only was everyone at my school saying it, but it was even being written as graffiti on the bathroom walls. And then, it was banned.
I don’t remember what word replaced it. I think there was a minor movement at one point to start cursing in “Battlestar Galactica” curse words, like feldegarb and frak, but that was only ever really taken seriously by the nerds, and we (ahem: I mean they) were all too busy rolling twenty-sided dies in the library to be bothered with trying to spread the word about anything.
Probably whatever word it was replaced with was eventually banned, too, just like I’m sure “douchebag” soon will be at Clementine’s school (if it isn’t already). Not that that will in any way solve the problem of kids calling each other names—but it will solve the problem of adults looking like they’re not in control.
At least to other adults.
There was a recent incident in the South where students, forbidden to wear “gang” clothing to school, instead started shaving vertical stripes into their eyebrows, supposedly to denote which gang they favored. This had the predictable result of “all eyebrow shaving” being banned. Did this change anything at the school?
No. But it did make the adults look like a bunch of total douchebags.