Snapdragon
Same here. Except suburban DC. I remember my dad showing me how to fold those when I was 6 or 7.
Same name, same state (Trenton).
Joe
We called them Chinese something. Chinese fortune tellers, IIRC. Ohio, 1960s. “Chinese” being the unfortunate slang for “disorganized, slapdash” as in “Chinese fire drill.”
We held those all the time. Ah, fond memories.
My place and era, but didn’t remember the name. IIRC, mostly girls used them.
I can’t for the life of me remember what we called them and nothing on the Wikipedia page rings a bell, but at my daughters’ school (in Canberra, Australia) they’re called chatterboxes.
When we were children we always referred to them as “Chinese fortune-tellers”.
Fortune tellers (Bay Area, CA, late 70s)
The first I heard of them being called cootie-catchers my son was in Kindergarten (2003).
Interesting. Cootie Catchers (Bay Area, CA, 60s)
Cootie Catchers, Boston suburbs, 1980’s.
Come to think of it, we called them Chinese fortune tellers, too. But I always thought the word Chinese meant strange and foreign, not haphazard.
Furthermore, I for some reason assumed the name had to do with origami, since you make the device out of folding paper. And I always got mixed up on whether origami was Chinese or Japanese.
And they never used a term to refer to the thing. It served in a parody of narratives in which some kind of mysterious, magical technology is being stolen.
From New Jersey and we called them Fortune Tellers. I never heard Cootie Catcher until reading this thread.
i have odd recollections of wish-somethings too but can’t remember the exact term. cootie-catchers was the “proper” name for it, which nobody ever used. most of the time you just started folding it and people knew what you were getting at so the name wasn’t very important i guess.
First learned of them as “snaps” in elementary (maybe 1st grade?) and later on as “cootie catchers” in middle school.
ETA - South Carolina, school in early 80s.
Community (the tv show) reminded me of them also - I haven’t seen one IRL in ages.
Cootie catcher - DC suburbs.
Heh. I teach them to my second graders every year near the end of the year, teach them because they’re a fun way to discuss things like symmetry and fractions, near the end of the year because I don’t want those fuckers in my classroom.
But my plan’s come back to bite me: I’ll be teaching third grade next year.