Elizabeth in Suffolk, Virginia, spent her early childhood in Hawaii, then moved to Indiana and found that kids had a different playground game that involved pretending to use a cootie shot to inoculate someone against imagined infection from cooties. In Indiana, they drew two circles on the back of someone’s hand then poked that hand with a finger, chanting “Circle circle dot dot, now you have your cootie shot.” In Hawaii, Elizabeth learned it as “Circle circle dot dot, now you have your ’uku shot.” The Hawaiian word ’uku means flea, and the word ukulele derives from Hawaiian words that mean jumping flea, a reference to the rapid motion of a musician’s fingers on the instrument’s strings. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Cootie Shots and ’Uku Shots”
Hi there, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Elizabeth Hopkins calling in from Suffolk, Virginia.
Well, hello, Elizabeth. Welcome.
What can we do for you?
Thanks for having me.
Sure, what can we do for you?
I just became familiar with your program a few weeks ago. I was happening to listening to it while I was in the car and remembered a situation that I was in when I was a kid of where I had moved from Hawaii to Indiana, and a child’s rhyme had one word variant in Hawaii to Indiana, and I pretty much not only made a fool of myself, but I was already an outsider moving from a very diverse culture to not-so-diverse culture, and this one word variant, it was shocking, and as a 10-year-old, it was pretty much expelled me from the in crowd. Yeah, I got over it quickly, but it was awkward at the moment.
So the saying, I believe in most of the continental United States is circle, circle, dot, dot. Now I have my cootie shot or you have your cootie shot. So someone who would be, ew, would all of a sudden be accepted because you gave them the inoculation, which is just circling and tapping the palm, the back of the hand.
Well, children’s rhyme.
Well, in Hawaii, it was circle, circle, dot, dot. Now you have your uku shot, which means little bugs.
Uhu, like U-H-U?
I don’t know how it was spelled. I was, you know, nine or ten years old, but I remember my mom explaining the word to me when I first learned it. She goes, it means little like ukulele, means little guitar. So she said it was a derivative from that.
Okay, interesting.
I love this.
Okay, so you’re on the playground and you circle somebody and you touch your finger to their wrist?
To the back of their hand. So you draw two circles on the back of their hand and then you tap it twice. Circle, circle, dot, dot.
And what’s really funny, I’m in a business networking and I had a coffee with somebody after I heard your program. And I brought this up, and he moved from Hawaii here to Virginia. And he finished the children’s rhyme with me with an uku shot. And we’re both, you know, I was 35 years ago when I did this. So we’re both fast-fast. And, yeah, and he was familiar. So I was like, okay, I’m not remembering this wrong. It’s not made up in my mind. This really did happen.
Oh, that must have felt good.
Yeah, yeah, confirmation.
Exactly, 35 years later, right?
Oh, and we can pile on more confirmation, at least for the larger notion of cootie shots. The Hawaiian variant, by the way, is one that I haven’t heard before, and I’m delighted to get it. Because a lot of folklore work has been done on the idea of cooties and things like cooties around the world. Because this whole game where somebody catches a thing on the playground and has to be inoculated, you can find it in the last 70 years in Italy, Germany, UK, Australia, and a whole bunch of other places. And it has a bunch of different names.
The opies, this husband and wife folklore team, they found 26 different diseases that children could catch from each other on the playgrounds of the United Kingdom. Diseases, quote-unquote. Like the lurgy.
Right.
So are you saying uku or uhu?
Uku.
Uku, okay.
Interesting.
Right.
Yeah, ukulele does come from Hawaiian words that mean jumping flea or jumping laos because of the way your fingers move on a ukulele when you’re playing really quickly.
Yes.
I remember that now.
Yes.
Yeah.
Your uku shot. It must have been yuku or yuku.
Yuku shot.
Okay.
I love that. I like that better than cooties, actually.
So did you adopt cooties?
Yes.
I adopted the cootie shot instead.
Yes.
Very quickly. And, you know, everything was fine. But I just remember later on, I became a teacher and I just remember, like you said, language is so powerful and how it includes you or excludes you. And that was a circumstance that excluded me at one moment.
Well, this has been wonderful. You’ve shared so much of your history and your story, and we really appreciate it.
Well, thank you for having me on the air. I will hopefully think of some more transitions with moves.
All right, take care now.
Thanks, guys.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
This is fascinating. My guess would be that the Hawaiian “cooties” was indeed ‘uku and not yuku. “Cooties” is a slang of kuto (lice) which British soldiers brought home, along with a few of the lice, I’m sure. Kuto is a Malay/Tagalog word (traced to Proto-Austronesian kutu) which means “body/head louse,” which is also used by extension for fleas and other such bugs and mites. So the words would be cognate. What fascinates me is that the Hawaiians adopted it in this way. How “cooties” got to every 3rd grade playground, now that is a great question.