Brian Palmer, “When Did ‘Douche’ Become an Insult?” (Slate, Mar. 2, 2012)
Lexicographer and Slate contributor Ben Zimmer points to a 1987 taping of The Morton Downey Jr. Show, during which an audience member taunted Lyndon Larouche with the phrase “Larouche is a douche.” The 1991 Anthrax song “Startin’ Up a Posse” includes the lyrics “You’re a douche, you’re a douche, you’re a douche,” in apparent reference to record executives and/or government censors.
Read the rest here.
On his Daily Beast blog “The Dish,” Andrew Sullivan is intrigued by “The Roots Of ‘Meh’“:
Ben Zimmer studies up:
Yiddish appears to be the ultimate source. I checked with Ben Sadock, a Yiddish expert in New York, and he turned up a tantalizing early example. In the 1928 edition of his Yiddish-English-Hebrew dictionary, Alexander Harkavy included the word meh (written in the corresponding Hebrew letters) and glossed it as an interjection meaning “be it as it may” and an adjective meaning “so-so.” (Meh is also used in Yiddish to represent the bleating of goats, but Sadock doesn’t think the two types of meh are necessarily related.)
From Zimmer’s blog:
[“The Simpsons” writer John] Swartzwelder did have a memory of where he first came across meh, though it wasn’t in Mad. “I had originally heard the word from an advertising writer named Howie Krakow back in 1970 or 1971 who insisted it was the funniest word in the world,” he told me.