"“Garbage person,” like “bloodsucker” or “Neanderthal,” is the type of descriptor that pretty much defines itself. In the interest of clarity, though, the term as used here does not refer to a sanitation worker, or a person made from actual detritus. It is, instead, someone terrible beyond belief, but in an everyday sort of way.
According to recent headlines, someone who ends their texts with a period may be a garbage person. Same with someone who refuses to chase down runaway napkinswhen they blow off their table, or chooses to listen to songs from the Entouragemovie trailer...
McCulloch doesn’t remember the first time she came across the idiom, but she does have a theory about its proliferation. “I think what’s different about this one is that it’s garbage being used as a prenominal modifier,” she says. When used in the traditionally insulting way, she points out, “garbage” is a plain old noun. Utter “this person is garbage,” and you’re setting up a direct comparison between those two things, in order to illustrate said person’s badness.
When used in this new way, though, garbage comes before the noun, a place usually reserved for descriptors or adjectives. There are only a few cases where nouns double as prenominal modifiers–"shit" is an example of this, says McCulloch. “Swear words are very versatile,” she says. “You can do all sorts of things with them.” Putting “garbage” or other nouns in this privileged syntactic position gives them some of the oomph of a swear"
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-linguistic-appeal-of-garbage-person-the-internets-favorite-insult
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