{"id":17527,"date":"2018-07-30T23:13:59","date_gmt":"2018-07-31T06:13:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17527"},"modified":"2018-07-15T00:10:26","modified_gmt":"2018-07-15T07:10:26","slug":"cooties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2018\/07\/30\/cooties\/","title":{"rendered":"cooties"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Occurred to me recently to wonder about the word <i>cooties<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n<p>According to Wikipedia:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>\u201cThe word [<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cooties\"><i>cooties<\/i><\/a>] is thought to originate from the Austronesian language family, in which the Philippine languages, Maori and Malaysian-Indonesian word <i>kutu<\/i> refers to a parasitic biting insect. The earliest recorded uses of the term in English are by British soldiers during the First World War to refer to lice that proliferated in battlefield trenches.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>(This is one of those cases where both etymology and entomology are relevant.)<\/p>\r\n<p>A <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Game_of_Cootie\">related Wikipedia article<\/a> also notes, perceptively, that \u201cAmong children, the word effectively serves as a device for enforcing separation of the sexes.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-etymology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17527"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17528,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17527\/revisions\/17528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}