Cooties
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Cooties is an American and Canadian slang term generally used by children to denote an unspecified state of repulsion, particularly towards another person, usually of the opposite sex ("Ugh, she has cooties!") Originally the term meant body lice, but over the generations this became generalised first to any sort of lice, including head lice, then later still to purely imaginary stand-ins for just about anything that is considered repulsive.
Cootie can also be used as a verb, as in "Don't touch that book! It was cootied by a boy!"
The term is thought to have originated in the trenches of World War I, but its origin is uncertain, especially in light of the fact that the term is unknown in the UK and Europe. It may derive from the Malay word kutu, meaning biting insect, but the word kutu describes headlice in several Pacific Island languages and may have been introduced to the USA via Polynesia.
A well-known toy is the Cootie Catcher, a folded paper arrangement that can reveal one or other internal surfaces when manipulated by hand. One surface is blank, the other drawn with dots representing the cooties. The joke is to show the blank side, then run the toy through a person's hair, revealing the dotted surface. The toy is so designed that the appearance of either surface is outwardly the same apart from the "cooties". A variation of the same toy is known to British schoolchildren (and in some locations in the US) as the Fortune teller.
Cooties in the Media
Cooties have been referred to in a number of episodes of The Simpsons, possibly baffling non-American viewers.
One of the standard cures for the imaginary infection of cooties is performed by circling your index finger over the arm twice, followed by two pokes while repeating the following saying: "Circle circle, dot dot, now you have a Cootie shot." A corroborating reference to this procedure can be found in the lyrics of the song Cooties from the musical Hairspray.
Another standard cure is to transmit the cooties to someone else. This intriguing etiology has found its way into games of tag, which sometimes invoke the name of this dread disease. More ominously, it may have influenced the popular southern African superstition that AIDS can be cured by having sex with a virgin.
External links
- Origin of "cooties" (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_235a.html) from The Straight Dope (http://www.straightdope.com/)