Scum itself has been used for many hundreds of years to refer to offensive, disgusting, or disreputable people, and thus many people take scumbag as an intensification of this scum with the suffix -bag, a frequent element in abusive slang terms (dirtbag; hosebag; sleazebag; etc.), all of which are, however, later than scumbag.
Though most people seem not to realize it now, the original sense of scumbag was 'a condom', based on the slightly earlier, and both rather obvious, scum 'semen' and bag 'a condom'.
A person regarded as despicable.
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