cooties
photo credit: "Little boy kissing a girl holding a doll" by simpleinsomnia (CC-BY-2.0) Image repeatedDefinition: (noun) An imaginary communicable disease or parasitic insect suffered by children
Example: Until he met Sandy in junior high school, Bob thought all girls had cooties.
Quote:
“Kissing Brad (Pitt) was so uncomfortable for me. I remember saying in interviews that I thought it was gross, that Brad had cooties. I mean, I was ten.”
Cooties used to be something pretty specific - body
lice or head lice. The term came into use around the time of the First
World War, when many soldiers undoubtedly suffered from them. But this
meaning was lost over time.
Many decades later, when I got to first grade, no one knew what cooties
really were. We just knew that they were really bad and that many undesirable
people, especially members of the opposite sex, were infested with them.
Getting to close to someone who had them was a serious social risk, as
they were easy to catch.
Girls invested (and still invest) a lot of time in making cootie
catchers out of folded paper, which were apparently used at one
time to catch cooties as they fell from someone's head.
This custom had also died out by my school days and cootie catchers
were used exclusively for telling fortunes.
The primary cure for cooties is adulthood. While being interviewed by a cow this spring on Nickelodeon, Brad Pitt was asked about the horrors of getting cooties from kissing his film costars. He responded by saying, “"Cooties are all right. I don't know where this myth started. Cooties are okay." Or perhaps he just thinks they're okay because Kirsten Dunst said he had them.
A. C. Kemp | July 31 , 2003
