Unbeknownst to your’s truly, there is apparently a website called Hot Chicks with Douchebags, which some publisher, using an� industry-standard strategy known as "flailing", decided should be turned into a book. One sensitive individual however is not taking his inclusion in the book’s pages very we– oh, for the love of Molly Dodd, if you’ve got more than one RSS feed in your reader, you already know all this, so there’s no need for me to catch you up.

The point is that this is all supposed to be very important with regard to bloggers, because the hypothetical is-or-is-not douche in question didn’t bother to sue the person insulting him, until an actual physical book was on the cusp of being published. If the question is one of hurt feelings, then shouldn’t he have sued prior to the impending release of the non-digital version?

Well, there are several things to consider: It may be that he didn’t know about it until now. Or, perhaps he was waiting for an appropriately juicy target, due to the perception that even a really successful blogger is not going to have pockets as deep as a book publisher. The most insulting (and therefore most interesting) possibility, however, is that he may just think that bloggers are such insignificant little pissants that nothing they can say could be construed as materially harmful or legally actionable. To which we say, nice try, but ask Dan Rather whether or not bloggers are harmless.

But way-hey, that’s not what we’re here for.

There’s something quite dismaying about the invasion of our common lexicon by the word "douche". As ever, we blame the Internet. In the days before incomprehensible YouTube response videos, all we netizens had to communicate with were our words. Given the uncensored nature of the digital frontier, it became second nature to use curse words as freely as a gang of middle-school kids trying to impress each other. Problem was, it all got old and boring, driving the masses to begin wholesale research into the naughty language-arts in an attempt to shock people who spent one-half of their time posting on forums and newsgroups, and the other half typing the word "fisting" into every search engine they could find. Somehow, "douche" arose from this mess, and has begun to insinuate itself into everyday speech.

We’re not fucking prudes, or anything, but "douche" is not a word we like to see used the way it has been, of late. It makes us uncomfortable in much the same way that "MILF" does — because they’re both overused, under-defined, and have now become TV-safe and family friendly by virtue of these traits.

More than that, however, is the discomfort we feel as students of history. Actually, more as students of bad teen films produced in the 1980′s, but that’s a kind of history, isn’t it? In any case, we beg you to check out some of the golden oldies of trashy 80′s movies, if you’d like a preview of what future generations will think we were like.

"Douche", for all its incoherence as an actual insult, is merely another word for "lame". And we all remember what fun we had with that one, back in the Reagan era. Both words inspired their respective generations to flights of fantastical coinage. There’s nothing new under the sun; every "douche", "superdouche", "galacti-douche" is merely a retread of such respectable ancestors as "lame", "lamewad", or "lamoid."

Fifteen years from now our obsession with douches, asshats, and fucktards, is going to be as embarrassingly painful to read as any era of slang past.