This is American hysteria's Aftershock, where I share with you a story that didn't make it into the main episode.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith. And today we're talking about cooties.

You have cooties. You have cooties. No, I'm don't.

I remember being in preschool and problematically chasing after a boy around the playground with my friend, trying to kiss him.

Not cool, Chelsea.

The boy was not just running away. He was full-blown

sprinting, looking behind him frantically like someone being chased in a slasher film. It was a matter

of dire consequence to this boy that he'd not be kissed by these girls, lest he catch the

most contagious and humiliating of all the

playground maladies, cooties.

Of course, one way that children learn is by mirroring the activities, conversations,

and emotions of their parents and other adults in their lives, who were often talking about germs.

So it makes sense that there would be a fictionalization, an imagination game that expressed

this constant potential for harm that children were aware of, but didn't quite understand.

Just like us.

The history of Cooties is weird, corporate, and culturally symbolic, like most things we talk about on this show.

The concept has a gritty beginning as a massive lice outbreak in the European trenches of World War I that sometimes cause diseases like typhus.

The first appearance of the word can be found in the 1918 memoir of British soldier Albert N. DePue, quote,

of course you know what the word kudis means. When you get near the trenches, you get a course in the

natural history of bugs, lice, rats, and every kind of pest that has ever been invented.

The word itself is believed to be derived from

Kutu, the word used in several Austronesian languages for lice that was probably learned by

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