If you’ve ever been accused of having cooties…this blog post is for you. Today we explore the question, “What are cooties?”.
If you grew up in the U.S., there’s a good chance that somebody chased you around the playground as a kid, yelling about how you had “cooties.” It’s a completely fictional childhood affliction of course, and one that reoccurs throughout the world. In the U.K., kids commonly accuse others of having “lurgy.” In Denmark, it’s “pigelus.”
The term “cooties” itself is thought to have originated from kutu, a word used for lice in various parts of southeastern Asia. Other linguists claim it’s based on kudis, a regional term in the same region for scabies. Western sailors and soldiers eventually picked up on the terms while stationed overseas in the early part of the 20th century, but corrupted the pronunciation into “cooties,” and took that word back to the U.S. and Europe.
The term eventually became common enough to inspire two board games in the years that followed. The more popular one was called The Game of Cootie. Originally released in 1948, it involves players piecing together plastic bugs called cooties. The first one to complete their cootie wins.
The details get hazy at this point, but it’s not hard to conclude how a term associated with creepy crawlies captured the imagination of kids all over the world. While no one seems to agree on exactly what a cootie is, it’s most often associated with lice. Depending of which of the seemingly infinite versions of the myth you heard as a child, you can catch cooties by touching or even coming within a few feet of a member of the opposite sex. “Cures” have included everything from reciting silly rhymes to having a friend pretend to give you an injection with their finger.
At least the British term has a more definitive origin story. Lurgy (also sometimes spelled lurgi) was a plot point on a 1954 episode of the classic (and bizarre) BBC radio program The Goon Show. “The dreaded lurgi” was a terrible disease that the show’s characters were convinced could ravage the U.K. in six weeks flat. Eventually, they figured out that it was all made up by two villains named Count Jim “Thighs” Moriarty and the Honourable Hercules Grytpype-Thynne.
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