cootie
- n a parasitic louse that infests the body of human beings
- During World War I the cootie was a joke to many people who had never been bitten by one.
- Three hundred years ago experimental medicine, then in its formative stage, recognized that the body louse ("cootie") carried typhus fever from one person to another.
- Given the thankless task of watching over troops on leave, rounding up stragglers during battle, the Military Police got in the soldiers' hair as incessantly as the cootie.