One child typically administers the 'shot' by reciting the rhyme 'circle, circle / dot, dot / now you've got the cootie shot' while using an index finger to trace the circles and dots on another child's forearm. In the United States, children sometimes ' immunize' each other from cooties by administering a 'cootie shot'.

In Sweden and Finland, it usually refers to girls, where they are known as 'tjejbaciller' (literally 'girl bacilli') and 'tyttГ¶bakteeri' ('girl bacteria'). The lice of the First World War trenches nicknamed 'cooties' were also known as 'arithmetic bugs' because 'they added to our troubles, subtracted from our pleasures, divided our attention, and multiplied like hell.' ДЇor ages 5 onwards, Cooties are known in Denmark as 'pigelus' (literally 'girl lice'), and 'drengelus' ('boy lice') and in Norway as 'jentelus' ('girl lice') and 'guttelus' ('boy lice'). ДЇrom its original meaning of head or body lice, the term seems to have evolved into a purely imaginary stand-in for anything contagious and repulsive. The term presumably having been brought to the West by Western sailors and/or soldiers who had traveled to Polynesia, the Philippines, or Malaya.

The word is thought to originate from the Austronesian languages' Polynesian, Tagalog, and Malayan word kutu, meaning lice, or kudis (pronounced kuЛђdiЛђs), meaning scabies. Lice were of course rife in the trenches on both sides of the conflict, and highly contagious. Cooties were treated by providing a pickle bath in some kind of solution. The infestation had originated from German soldiers who had become infested in the trenches. O'Brien's case had been caught in the prison camp in Courtrai. Pat O'Brien's memoir published March 1918, Outwitting the Hun: My Escape from a German Prison Camp refers to 'cooties,' on pages 61, 62 and 63, which in Lt. When you get near the trenches you get a course in the natural history of bugs, lice, rats and every kind of pest that had ever been invented.' Similarly, Lieut. Albert Depew's World War I memoir, Gunner Depew (1918), includes: 'Of course you know what the word 'cooties' meansВ . It appeared in a 1917 service dictionary. The earliest known recorded uses of cooties in English date back to the First World War.

Review of the movie cooties