“Cooties” = the imaginary disease that (pre-pubescent) girls have, making boys hesitant to touch them (or vice-versa).
How does your language treat this phenomenon?
In the Malay language: kutu. Which is literally the Malay word for lice and the origin of the loanword cootie in English. As for the metaphorical meaning enforced by cruel children… the closest corresponding practices would be the purity/impurity laws in various religions and customs. Particularly the caste system, which is the cooties system writ large. By adults who ought to know better.
I’m struggling to think how British English deals with it!
Neither my Spanish nor my Catalan dialects have direct translations (doesn’t mean there aren’t others that do), but of course we do have ways of dealing with the concept of “X are yucky!”:
Person complaining about having to deal with undesirable: B-b-b-but she’s a girl! or But he’s a BOY! (said in an extremely whiny voice and/or stomping one’s foot)
Authority responding: :rolleyes: (S)He doesn’t have lice, now go out and play!
Piojoso/pullòs are insults in both languages but have different meanings. Both literally mean “someone who has lice”; piojoso (Spanish) refers to someone who’s dirty and uncouth but pullòs (Catalan) is someone who combines being a nitpicker with not knowing when to let go of an issue - a Doper with a bad hair day. The Spanish for this second one is picajoso (derived from picar ajos, “to chop up garlic”, an activity which requires paying close attention to your fingertips and which leaves you smelling strongly).
For activities viewed as having cooties, the response from authority might be “it won’t make your hands fall off”. Unmanly, “it won’t make your dick fall off”. Unwomanly, “you won’t lose your tits for doing that”. Apparently the only activities which are reasonably classified as undesirable are those presenting an actual risk of amputation.
In Swedish we have the words tjejbaciller and killbaciller, meaning girl germs and boy germs, respectively.
The “lurgy”
‘Girl germs’
Dutch - can’t think of anything.
The literal meaning sure, but nothing in Japanese that corresponds with the idiomatic meaning.
Nothing like it in Afrikaans that I know of.
I love the 'Dope! Thanks, Johanna.
The Lurgy
I don’t know if you did it intentionally, but since nits are lice larvae, “nitpicking” is literally lice removal. [/pedant]
I see a couple of posters think The Lurgy suffices.
I’m not sure it does and I’m with you Baron Greenback, I can’t think of a proper synonym.
The dreaded lurgy would probably be the nearest thing, but it’s a condition that can afflict members of both sexes.
I’d never heard of the dreaded lurgy, but just googled the definition.
Yeah, doesn’t sound like a good fit. Lurgy sounds like an actual physical ailment, whereas cooties is an imaginary condition caused by being in proximity to the opposite sex.
Lurgy sounds closer to “Crawling Crud” or “Phillipine Fallapart”. Or Rockin’ Pneumonia & Boogie-Woogie Flu.
Yeah, The Dreaded Lurgy is not the same. As a kid we just declared that ‘girls smell’.
Certainly, “the lurgy” wasn’t used that way when I was a kid. If it was used at all, it was for an unspecified, likely imaginary, illness. It certainly wasn’t a feature of the endless primary school games of “Kiss, cuddle or torture”*
- Boys vs girls, a chase game, a game of tig. If you got caught you had to select your punishment - the “torture” was either a swipe at your upper arm or the dreaded “kiss and cuddle” combo.
There isn’t a synomyn in any Latin American Spanish dialect that I’m aware of either.
Cooties aren’t imaginary, even if the kids don’t know what it really means or use it correctly. Someone with cooties simply is the same thing as someone with lice.