Parents are a funny breed. They mean well and try to set us on the correct path but sometimes the things they teach are just well-meaning garbage.

When my brother John and I were very young, our mom and dad (mostly mom) warned us about the cooties. There are variations of it, but we were told that hanging around poor people there was something that you could catch. The disease was called the cooties. Looking back now I thought the whole thing was preposterous. One of my friends tells me that in his neighborhood they wrote the letters CP on the palm of their hand as a kind of charm. The letters meant Cooties Protected and was a kind of a visa that protected you from catching the cooties. We didn’t have that down around Pleasant Street and Atlantic Avenue. Related to that, for all of my youth I thought that the idea of the cooties was some kind of inner-city St. John’s thing and was only known downtown. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Cooties is all over the place. It is everywhere.

Mistakenly I thought for a while it could have been only a Newfoundland thing. No way. Cooties is something pretty close to universal and world-wide although the notion of it being a disease of poverty in Newfoundland seems rooted in St. John’s. A friend of mine heard of it in central Newfoundland when she was growing up. With her, though, it was something transmitted female to male but still somehow related to being poor and somehow related to a tick. It sounds harsh but, in the world, there is a relationship between poverty and disease with cleanliness being part of the equation. Disease doesn’t cause cooties but runs along with it without there being a causal effect. In our culture there was the notion of disease being of the poor. We were told tuberculosis and polio were two of those diseases of the poor.

It turns out cooties is a worldwide phenomenon even though it is a mythical disease. There is no such thing as cooties.

Despite that revelation it is referenced and written about in Canada and the United States and in Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippine’s. It is like similar afflictions in Britain, Italy, Iraq and India that have different names.

In lore a child is said to catch cooties from an infected person or from an opposite-sex child of the same age. The first reported use of the term in English came from World War 1 when the British referred to lice in the filthy battlefield trenches as the cooties. You might think I’m making this up as I go along but I’m not. The good news is that I never believed in cooties, no matter what by parents or the boys in the hood said. I always thought it was a crock.

I wouldn’t walk on a crack in a sidewalk. I always protected myself from the fairies by carrying a piece of bread when walking through a graveyard. I drew the line somewhere before the cooties. I never wrote CP on the palm of my hand. I just never bought the story.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca