I was really surprised to hear the word "Douchebag" being used in this film. I don't know... for some reason I imagined that term would have originated later than the mid 80's. Guess I was wrong! (Just a random thought).
www.carissajaded.com
Not to quibble, but the real question is: did the term exist, and was it widely used as an insult, in the mid-1930s, when the movie is set?
We know it existed when the movie was made, since it's there.
I'm infinitely more interested in the answer to this question, regarding it's use in the mid-1930s, even though I originally was wondering the same thing as the OP.
"Who do you think you are, Bill Clinton? You're a comptroller!"
It's used in another Allen film 'Radio Days' set in the early 1940s too.
"I re-evaluated our lives. I got a 10, you got a 6"
It’s possible it was used as a pejorative term as early as the 1930’s or ‘40’s although it appears it wasn’t widely used as an insult until the 1960’s.
The 1951 classic novel From Here to Eternity by James Jones used it as an adjective;
“The trouble with you, Pete,” the voice that did not seem to come with him but from that cigaret said savagely, “is that you can’t see further than that douchebag nose of yours.”
i was a little surprised as well. The first time i ever heard it as an insult was Revenge of the Nerds (1984), where Booger says Stan Gable looks like his mom's old douchebag, but even there he wasn't calling him a douchebag outright, just comparing him to one... I bet its a New York thing.
shareGeorge Carlin, from New York, said 'douchebag' was slang for any female: 'He brought two douchebags with him.' Maybe it then became an insult in the 60s, when I first heard it used as an insult, you douchebag.
shareI did a double take when I heard that, too! I figured it was a mistake of some kind, but when I saw your post here I looked it up and was surprised to find the term being used before 1900... https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=7&case_insensitive=on&content=douchebag&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cdouchebag%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bdouchebag%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BDouchebag%3B%2Cc0
share