If I kiss boys will I get the cooties?

Question

drsexthingy · Accepted Answer

Where Did We Get Cooties?

Can we get cooties from a cooter? Etymologically? No.

But if you do get cooties from a cooter, there’s a good chance they’ll be crabs.

Cooties was the term members of the military used in World War I to refer to the body lice that ravaged the soldiers, compounding the misery of the trenches and transmitting diseases like typhus. Some etymologists have proposed that this sense of cooties came from kutu, the word for louse in Malay and Maori, but it most likely came from cooty, a British regionalism meaning “infested with lice” and referring originally to coots—waterfowl (such as auks)—that were perceived as dirty and teeming with parasites. This sense of coot is quite old, coming from the Middle English cote, and the Oxford English Dictionary has a citation of “as lousy as a coot” from 1864.

When soldiers went home at the end of the war, they took with them their cooties despite concerted delousing efforts, and the word entered general parlance, accounting for the spike in usage around 1920:

Although this sense has stuck around in some regions, by the mid-20th century, North American children had co-opted the word to mean an imaginary germ carried by other kids, usually of the opposite sex. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation of this sense is from Eleanor Estes’ 1951 book Ginger Pye—“All the boys and girls in Grade Five said Addie Egan had cooties and she really did not have cooties at all.” And the OED acknowledges that this quote could be transitional from the earlier, lousy sense.

Cooter, in contrast, is much newer. Besides being the name of a Dukes of Hazzard character and city in Missouri, cooter has only in the last few decades taken on the meaning of female genitalia. People in the southern United States, beginning with black Americans in the early 1800s, use cooter to refer to a few species of box turtles and tortoises. The word may have come from kuta, meaning turtle to the Bambara and Malinke people of West Africa. Snapping turtle began to be used in the South as a erotophobic euphemism for vagina, and cooter eventually took on the same meaning, probably beginning in the mid-’70s, although the earliest citation for this usage in Connie Eble’s dictionary of campus slang is from 1986. In the same dictionary, cooter is also said to mean a female—“cooter madness: girl crazy”—a cite from 1977.