Submitted by: Submitted by youngj11x
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Category: World History
Date Submitted: 02/06/2016 05:01 PM
Cooties: The origin, Eradication, and history
The word cooties derive from the Austronesian languages Tagalog, Māori and Malay
word kutu, which refers to a parasitic biting insect. The earliest record of the word being used
was in world war one by the British in the trenches for lice. This is when Americans first heard
the word it became a big thing in America while U.S. troops were returning from the war in
nineteen fifties from the south pacific. The cooties game developed during the nineteen fifties
polio epidemic, and became associated with uncleanliness. Cooties were exploited during the
nineteen hundreds with a lot of it being from games. In nineteen fifteen a handheld game was
made by IrvinSmith Company out of Chicago it depicted a battlefield scene where you had to
get the cooties into a trap on the other side of the board. In nineteen fortyeight The Game of
Cootie was launched by Schaper Toys the game became an icon, in two thousand and three it
was included on the Toy Industry Associations “Century of Toys List”.
There were a lot of different types of “cooties” there was the common American
Greyback, the Black Algerian Schinnels, the great Blue Louse from India, the British Blue
Bloods, the Belgian GoldStriped Heneckers, the French Grey and the Gold Parisian Cooties.
With all these different lice being in one area they reproduced and by the end of the war had
created the most intelligent cootie. They were known to bite the soldiers at just the right time to
save the soldier's lives for often when a shell left the German trenches the Cootie would bite the
soldiers, causing them to stoop and scratch at just the exact time that the shell would pass over
the place where the soldier's head had been. Many soldiers, lying in their shell holes, were
saved from death when the highly intelligent Cooties, knowing that a shell was coming in their ...