Catching Cooties-- Part 2: The Bane of the Playground and Your Vaccination

"Help, I've Been Touched By A Girrrrlll!!!"  EEEWWWWWWwwwwww!!!

Shrieking games of cooties tag spread the contagion rapidly.  It can be treated with an origami "cootie catcher," but it is better to be vaccinated.  This requires a friend and a retractable pen.  Your friend clicks the pen into your arm while chanting "circle, circle, dot,dot, now you have your cootie shot."

There were variations of what is said in different areas.

I seem to remember that you got rid of cooties by touching someone else, a buddy perhaps.

Of course, if you saw someone rapidly approaching and you thought they might have cooties, it is best to flee for your life.  Better to flee and not need that vaccination.

Everyone Knows Girls Have Da Cooties.  --Cootie

Catching Cooties-- Part 1: A World War I to the Playground Thing

From the May 2019 Smithsonian magazine by Jane C. Hu.

Of all the germs kids are exposed to one playgrounds, there's one they freak out about more than any other:  COOTIES.

The word first appeared in World War I as soldier slang for the painful body lice that infested the trenches.

It went mainstream in 1919 when a Chicago company incorporated the pest into the Cootie Game, in which a player maneuvered colored "cootie" capsules across a painted battlefield into a cage.

The cootie concept has be evolving ever since.
The most familiar incarnation on the playground has a lot to do with what the kids think about the opposite sex.  Every little six-year-old girls knows that boys have cooties and vice versa.

One catches cooties by--eww!--touching.  If a little girl gets touched by a boy who has cooties (and they all do), she now has cooties.  But wait!!!  There's a cure.

I Always Heard It Was the Little Girls Who Had Cooties.   --CootieCoot