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Cooties

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For other uses, see Cootie.

Cooties is a non-scientific term in North American English used by children for an imaginary "disease" said to infect through contact. The term may have originated with references to lice, fleas and other pests. A child is said to "catch" cooties through any form of bodily contact, proximity, or touching of an "infected" person or from a person of the opposite sex of the same age. The phrase is most commonly used by children aged 4–10; however it is also used by many others older than 10 years of age.[1]

Etymology

The earliest known recorded uses of cooties date back to the First World War, including a 1917 service dictionary.[2] Albert Depew's World War I memoir, Gunner Depew (1918), includes: "Of course you know what the word "cooties" means ... When you get near the trenches you get a course in the natural history of bugs, lice, rats and every kind of pest that had ever been invented."[3] Similarly, Lieut. Pat O'Brien's 1918 memoir Outwitting the Hun: My Escape from a German Prison Camp refers to "cooties," meaning body lice, which in his case had been caught in the prison camp in Courtrai. Lice were of course rife in the trenches on both sides of the conflict, and highly contagious.

From its original meaning of head or body lice, the term seems to have evolved into a purely imaginary stand-in for anything contagious and repulsive.

Other terms

The lice of the First World War trenches nicknamed "cooties" were also known as "arithmetic bugs," because, "they added to our troubles, subtracted from our pleasures, divided our attention, and multiplied like hell."[4]

For ages 5 onwards, Cooties are known in Denmark as "fnat," or "pigelus" (literally "girl lice") and "drengelus" ("boy lice"), and in Norway "jentelus" ("girl lice") and "guttelus" ("boy lice"). In Sweden and Finland it usually refers to girls, where they are known as tjejbaciller"[5] (literally "girl bacillus") and "tyttöbakteeri" ("girl bacteria") respectively. In Britain, the term "lurgy" (or lurgi or lurgie) is used by children in a similar way. This is why, in the Harry Potter book, Luna Lovegood refers to the Slytherin team as suffering from "Loser's Lurgy".

Play treatment

The cooties shot

Children sometimes "immunize" each other from cooties by administering a "cootie shot". One child typically administers the "shot" by reciting the rhyme "circle, circle / dot, dot / now you've got the cootie shot" while using an index finger to trace the circles and dots on another child's forearm.

In some variations,a child may continue to then say "circle, circle / square, square / now you have it everywhere", in which case the child receives an immunization throughout his or her body. These variations may continue to a final shot where the child then says "circle, circle / knife, knife / now you've got it all your life", or "circle, circle / fire, fire / now your shot will never expire", or "nickel, nickel / dime, dime / now you've got it all the time" while using their index finger to draw vertical lines on the other child's forearm.

Alternatively, cooties can be immunized through one child creating a square using his or her index and middle fingers (making a peace sign in each hand and laying one on top of the other). The other child then pokes his index finger through the square, at which point he becomes immunized from cooties infection.

In playground lore, the power of a "cootie shot" is not limited to use as an immunization. The "victim" of cooties may receive a cootie shot as treatment, at which time the cootie shot may "cure" the disease. In this way, the cootie shot acts more like an antidote rather than a vaccine. When used as an antidote, sometimes a "cooties shot" is actually just a punch to the upper arm which then "cures" the punched one from the "disease".

See also

References

  1. ^ Sue Samuelson (July 1980). "The Cooties Complex". Western Folklore. 39 (3, Children's Folklore): 198–210. doi:10.2307/1499801. OCLC 50529929.
  2. ^ Frank H. Vizetelly (1917). The soldier's service dictionary of English and French terms: embracing 10,000 military, naval, aeronautical, aviation, and conversational words and phrases used by the Belgian, British, and French armies, with their French equivalents carefully pronounced, the whole arranged in one alphabetical ... (2 ed.). Funk & Wagnalls. p. 34.
  3. ^ Depew, Albert N., Gunner Depew, (1918). Cited in Frederic Gomes Cassidy, Joan Houston Hall, A Dictionary of American Regional English, p. 770 (1985) p. 770.
  4. ^ Robert B. Asprey (1996). At Belleau Wood. University of North Texas Press. p. 26. ISBN 9781574410167.
  5. ^ http://appserv.cs.chalmers.se/users/peterlj/runtime05/projects/hugnplay/doc/Projektrapport.pdf p. 10


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