doosh!

It's a sound effect from my youth, a piece of onomatopoeia I haven't heard in years. The sound doosh! represented many things in elementary, junior high, and high school, almost all related to action movies and TV series: multiple bullet impacts (doosh, doosh, da-doosh!), the sound of someone's ass being kicked, the sound of a fist connecting with a jaw, the sound of boats and cars and planes and farm animals smashing into each other at high rates of speed, or even the sound of someone slapping someone else.

Doosh! could be prolonged to indicate an impact occurring in slow motion (dooooooooossssssshhhhh!), or could be done with a "reverb" effect to help your audience understand what it felt like to be struck in the face by Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man. The latter sound effect had two major bionic variants: doo-doo-doo-doosssshhhh! and doooooo-sh-sh-sh-sh-sssshhhh!

Somewhere along the way came puberty and the realization that doosh! had a different meaning for women. Boys adapted quickly to the new linguistic environment, and in a fit of gender-lexical imperialism they reappropriated doosh! to create the awesome slang term doosh!bag.

Ah, the good old days.


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