Last week on Facebook we linked to an article by Lori Fradkin, a former copyeditor for New York magazine, “What It’s Really Like To Be A Copy Editor.” It is funny and biting.

The article opens this way: “The word is douche bag. Douche space bag. People will insist that it ’s one closed-up word — douchebag — but they are wrong.”

Naturally, all the copyeditors who read her article had to test that claim, this one included. Is douchebag really two words?

At the Economist’s Johnson Blog, R.L.G had a well-informed response, with this key paragraph:

Many interesting things can be said about compounds. They come in noun-noun (”kitchen-table issues”), adjective-noun (”private-sector wages”), adjective-adjective (”blue-green flowers”) and other varieties. In writing, they tend to enter the language as two words. If they survive and are used frequently, they often pass through a period of hyphenation before fusing. (My 1933 OED includes only “year-book”, not “yearbook”, the latter now nearly universal.) In (English) speech, we know that a compound has begun to be fused, with a specific meaning, when the stress moves to the first syllable. When photographers first began developing glass plates, they looked for a dark room; now, they use a specialised room, a dárkroom, which (as Steven Pinker notes) can be lit, just as a blackboard can be green.

R.L.G. deals mostly with the sound of compounds, but I think there’s something more to be said about the shift in meaning he mentions in the last sentence and how that affects whether compounds are open or closed.

The word we’re talking about here isn’t the feminine hygiene device. It’s the derogatory slang word for someone — usually a man — who is pushy or ostentatious in ways that are annoying to everyone else. A man is especially douchey — as the slang adjective goes — if he believes what he does, says, or buys make him really super-cool — but he doesn’t have any idea that nobody cares but him.

Douchebag is a compound word. That is, it’s made of two other words, douche and bag. Douche is a method or device for cleaning the body, especially the female genitals, and bag, is well, a sack for holding things.

Bag also happens to be just common enough in other derogatory slang words that it has a negative valence. When making derogatory words, if you add “bag” at the end, you can sometimes make it just a little more derogatory. This is thanks to other slang words like windbag, dirtbag, and scumbag. So it adds a little something extra to douchebag.

Now, there are three types of compound words. Douchebag is a closed compound word. This simply means the two words are blended together to make just one.

An open compound is where the two words still have a space between them.

Hyphenated compounds are in between the two.

Much has been written about open and closed compounds, but the best point that applies here is that opening or closing a compound can depend upon the degree and type of lexicalization that an editor sees in the word.

If the two component parts of the compound are transparent when together — that is, they create a new meaning that is no more complex than Meaning One plus Meaning Two — then it is suitable to keep them open (that is, separated by a space).

If the two component parts when put together create a new meaning that is opaque — that is, they create a new meaning that goes beyond Meaning One plus Meaning Two — then it is suitable to close them (that is, make them one word).

Hyphenating a compound suggests that the lexicalization is well underway.

Since the 1940s, our word (the derogatory one) has been spelled douche bag with a space, douche-bag with a hyphen, and douchebag as one word. It hasn’t really been settled that one form is so common that it becomes the de facto spelling.

Although lexicalization can be a concrete principle on which to base a decision as to whether to close a compound or keep it open, there’s still a loosey-goosey factor. One’s experience with a compound and the current use in question can be different from someone else’s. I happen think that the derogatory slang meaning of douchebag is so far removed from its component words that it should be a one-word closed compound.

However, someone else might have a distinct connection in their brain back to the hygiene device, which is an open compound — two words — and prefer to follow that orthography. In asking those around me, I find that many people know better what a slang douchebag is than what the original douche bag was.

But, in the end, it is still about a style choice and not about any inherent grammar, syntax, or rightness. So the editor of a publication’s house style guide — such as the one they presumably use at New York magazine can decide to make douche bag two words — and that’s the way it is. It could be one word somewhere else.

Buy the way, the Atlantic Wire has a great roundup of articles about copyeditors and copyediting.

If you have a question, drop us a line at copydesk@copyediting.com or leave a message here.

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