Like a real virus, cooties mutate, and they’ll likely be around for as long as children have insecurities to play out.The Sundance hit Cooties will be one of the debut releases of the newly-launched Lionsgate Premiere label, which will release the film on September 18th in select theaters and on demand.īloody Disgusting landed this hilarious exclusive infographic video with voiceover from Jack McBrayer! There’s a greater emphasis on body shaming, Bronner says. Nowadays, cooties also reflect other concerns, particularly physical appearance an obese child, for instance, might be said to have cooties. Bronner has observed the emergence of this form of cooties in the 1950s, when the polio vaccine became ubiquitous, and a spike in its popularity in the 1980s, during the height of the AIDS epidemic. The cootie shot itself is part teaching tool, part coping mechanism. Play helps kids make sense of new ideas, experiences and emotions, not to mention traditional gender roles. The purpose of something like the cootie shot, passed down from generation to generation, “must be profoundly important if all these kids are choosing to participate in it,” says Tok Thompson, an anthropologist at the University of Southern California who studies modern folklore. Kids, after all, are their own “semiliterate society” with their own cultural touchstones, says Simon Bronner, a folklorist at Penn State Harrisburg who has studied children’s traditions. To historians and social scientists, the cooties phenomenon isn’t just child’s play.
This 1920s version of the game encouraged players of all ages to "capture the cooties." Doing so would be "good for your nerves," it promised. In Louisville, the charm is “line, line, dot, dot, operation cootie shot” in Los Angeles, kids “pinch, pinch” in lieu of the “dot, dot” in Hawaii, the process is known as an “ uku shot.” Your friend clicks the pen onto your arm while chanting “circle, circle, dot, dot, now you have your cootie shot.” Folklore archives and internet forum threads show that regional variations of the therapeutic regimen have emerged. This requires a friend and a retractable pen. It can be treated with an origami “cootie catcher,” but it is better to be vaccinated. Shrieking games of cooties tag transmit the contagion rapidly. Every little girl knows that boys have cooties, and vice versa. The most familiar incarnation has features of a real infectious disease even as it says a good deal about what 6-year-olds think of the opposite sex. The cooties concept has been evolving ever since. 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 word first appeared during World War I as soldiers’ slang for the painful body lice that infested the trenches. Of all the germs kids are exposed to on the playground, there’s one they freak out about more than any other: cooties. The childhood game of "cooties" has endured among schoolchildren.
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