I can remember the fateful day in the 5th grade at Reinhardt
Elementary School when we found in the school library, the book "The
Chinese Art of Paper Folding," originally published in 1948.
So that's where the Japanese learned the art of paper folding they call Origami, from the Chinese.
For
the rest of the year, nary a scratch of paper was not picked up and
made into boxes for water bombs, hats and animal figures;. I remember
being able to make a crane - so difficult but so elegant. We folded up
small pieces of paper which we folded into boxes. Stuck up inside the
bottom of the crane, they became "eggs" when you moved the wings.
Learned even earlier was a folded-up paper called the
"Cootie Catcher." You put four fingers in the bottom. When you opened
it up with two fingers, it showed nothing inside. When you opened it up
with the other two fingers, it showed it contained "cooties" - dark pen
markings.
You didn't really know what "cooties" were, but you knew they were bad, really bad. And that you "caught" them from girls.
They
were on par with the annual check for head lice by the School Nurse in
the gymnasium where they waved a purple light across your scalp.
We had visions of our hair being cut off and being sent home with a small lice comb and a foul-smelling medicated shampoo.
As
boys, what we should have "caught" from girls was intelligence, manners
and simple common sense, which only came later in our lives.
Cooties
The
earliest known use of the word "cooties" dates back to the first World
War in 1917 service dictionary as well as several 1918 war memoirs.
The word is thought to originate from a Polynesian
Tagalog and Malay word for "kuta" meaning a parasite biting insect. The
term presumably was brought to the West by Western sailors.
The lice of the first World War trenches, nicknamed
"cooties", were also known as "arithmetic bugs," because "they added to
our troubles, they subtracted from our pleasures, divided our attention
and multiplied like Hell."
Often the infected person is someone who is perceived as "different" and bears some social stigma.
Wikipedia
2012
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