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Of course some people are more at risk than others, but we all live in the same cooty swamp and need to take precautions appropriate to our individual situation.

If you are anywhere near my age, you may have grown up believing that the opposite sex was afflicted with imaginary yet dangerous “cooties,” and that to avoid infection one must have “cooty shots” administered regularly.

Certain diving and swimming birds were called coots back in the 1300s, and those birds got lots of parasites, and so people started calling other things with parasites “cooty.”

The mood is so lulling that the intrusion of climactic plot devices involving an alcoholic friend and a cooty cousin seems not only extraneous but downright rude.

I bent my head for'd to reach over on the back of my neck to pick him off, at one and the same time a sniper cut loose at me from a big tree just outside the line of Fritzies trenches; had my head been where it was before I started to get the cooty, it would have been fare-thee-well Barney, so I just put Mr. Lifesaver back, and, as before stated, I'm gonna put him on a penshun.