cooties

[Geoffrey Nathan]

I mentioned this to my wife, Margaret Winters, who grew up in Brooklyn about the same time as several others on this list, and she recalled the term 'cootie garage' for the curled-up hair around the ears that I associate with Princess Leia. She remembered it from the book _Cheaper by the dozen_, 1948, a memoir of the twenties.
A quick google turned up an entry from DARE:

'Cootie garage'  n. [cootie n 1]. joc
Human hair (esp in a particularly puffy hairstyle) where lice might live.
1922. Lewis. Babbit 342, Hey, leggo, quit crushing me cootie-garage.

Geoff



Geoffrey S. Nathan
Faculty Liaison, C&IT
and Associate Professor, Linguistics Program
+1 (313) 577-1259 (C&IT)
+1 (313) 577-8621 (English/Linguistics)

----- "Alice Faber" <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU> wrote:

> From: "Alice Faber" <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Sent: Monday, July 6, 2009 7:38:18 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: Re: cooties
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Alice Faber <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>
> Organization: Haskins Laboratories
> Subject:      Re: cooties
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Laurence Horn wrote:
> > At 10:45 AM -0400 7/6/09, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >> I can picture the "device," but IIRC in my Manhattan elementary
> school it
> >> was used to offer advice and tell fortunes, not to catch "cooties"
> in any
> >> sense of the word.  Possibly it was called a "Chinese fortune
> cookie,"
> >> which
> >> it resembled in shape. But that may simply be my imagination
> playing
> >> cruel
> >> tricks on all of us.
> >>
> >> The seven-year old spirit medium would inscribe a pair of messages
> on the
> >> inside, which would appear alternately as his (usually her)
> fingertips
> >> opened and closed the folded
> >> paper.
> >>
> >> The supplicant would call an odd or even number and the medium
> would open
> >> and close the mystical folds accordingly, then reveal the visible
> >> message.
> >>
> >> "Yes" or "No" questions worked best. In theory the device could
> direct
> >> all
> >> of your future actions, so it was important to use a medium you
> could
> >> trust.
> >>
> >>
> >> JL
> >
> > Yes, that sounds right to me as well, and there was a chant that
> > accompanied the manipulation of the device.  It would also tell you
> > your (or whoever's) favorite color and other such information.
> > Fortunes were part of it, but not cooties.  If they were
> (sometimes?)
> > called "cootie catchers" (Jon's "fortune cookies" does ring a
> distant
> > bell) I probably processed it as an opaque label, and certainly
> > didn't make any connection with lice.  As I mentioned earlier, I
> > never thought of a cootie in the singular; cooties in the plural
> were
> > as abstract as the willies or the creeps.  IIRC.
>
> I think we called them "fortune tellers". And there was definitely a
> chant. At the end of the chant, we used the corners of the device to
> pinch the person whose fortune was being told. (In retrospect, this
> pinching might reflect the "cootie catcher" origin, and I do, in
> fact,
> have a vague notion that I knew "cootie catcher" as an alternative
> name.)
> --
> ========================================================================
> Alice Faber
> faber at haskins.yale.edu
> Haskins Laboratories                            tel: (203) 865-6163
> x258
> New Haven, CT 06511 USA                               fax (203)
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