Douche bag

Douche is French for a shower or a jet of water applied to some part of the body and in this latter, chiefly medical sense, it has been in the English language according to the OED since the late 18th century. A douche bag is a sterile bag, usually made of rubber or some other flexible material, which together with a syringe is used for douching or cleansing the vagina, a practice that started during the 19th century and which has now largely died out. As American slang for an obnoxious, offensive person it is thought to derive from the US military during the 1940s, where a douche bag was a military misfit. Its first citation in literature in this slang sense is from the 1951 novel From Here to Eternity by James Jones and has now become a popular insult usually applied to men.