I should be sleeping. Instead, I tracked down the etymology of "chotch," or "chach," a noun used to describe anything from "a cheesy male who thinks he's got game" to a straight-up jerk.

The last represents an extended sense of the word, as people use it for its negative connotation rather than because it's the best choice, and it becomes synonymous with other general insults. Compare "decimate," which people now use to mean "devastate" because it gets the point across.

Fellow English major Zack hypothesized that the term may come from Office Space, Chotchkie's being the name of the restaurant where Jennifer Aniston's character works. I can see that, but I'm not about to look through hundreds of webpages to verify that none of them used some variant on the word "chotch" before that movie came out.

Here's my (folk?) etymology, which I fished from urbandictionary. The term comes from "Happy Days," and originally likened guys to the character Chachi Arcola, who, especially for modern viewers, seems to epitomize some uncool qualities. I haven't seen the show so I can't elaborate.

The great thing about this word is that the negative connotation is easy to pick up. Maybe because it sounds like crotch. So we have "He's a real Chachi" from speakers who know what they're saying.

Eventually others pick it up and, like me, think the word is spelled something like "chotchy." Because that E-sound at the end makes it sounds like an adjective, they move "chotchy" or "chachi" in front of the noun, giving us sentences like "he's a real chotchy guy."

Then comes the fun part, backformation. Now conceiving of chotchy as an adjective or adverb, speakers get rid of the E-sound to form a noun, "chotch" or "chach." As is often the case with backformation, speakers begin to assume that the new word came first.

As for its modern usage, I usually think along the lines of something like the British word "chav", mixed with the old American standby "prep." Except in its broadest pejorative uses, the word describes a vague social class, in the same way that "geek" or "jock" might.

Though I can't really see members of that class adopting this label and making it their own, which makes it a bit different from my examples — and also explains why Lawrence's "Fantasy Chotch" league must remain forever secret.

Still no clue why we sometimes call jungle juice "wop."