M A C V A Y S I A

My family’s pretty Scottish, despite the fact that the most recently anyone in my family tree actually lived in Scotland was around the middle of the 19th century. When the Scots on my mother’s side of the family — all Catholic, Gaelic-speaking Highlanders — migrated to what is now Nova Scotia, they lived in little communities filled with other Catholic, Gaelic-speaking Highlanders, usually from the same places they were from. When one thinks of such people, one might imagine they wore kilts. They were, after all, very Scottish. However, that wasn’t the case.

Duncan MacLeod of Eigg, whom I often call Duncan the Gardener, probably didn’t wear a kilt, which in his lifetime had long since ceased to be an integral part of the Gael’s daily dress, even in Scotland. His children most probably didn’t wear kilts, including his son Angus, my great-great-grandfather, who lived on River Denys Mountain in a place called Upper Southwest Mabou, in Glencoe. Angus married Jessie MacInnis of Judique Intervale, whose family also probably didn’t wear kilts. Instead, the Scottish men in my family, who were all very Scottish, wore pants. Probably wool pants. They probably didn’t even care much about tartans and clans and all that. The Jacobites’ loss at the Battle of Culloden had a lot to do with this, but it might also have had something to do with the fact that people (and peoples) change. They move on; they adapt; they evolve.

I wore a kilt the evening of my wedding reception. In fact, for several years the wearing of kilts at weddings and other formal occasions has been gaining in popularity where I’m from. For the wedding itself, the day before, I had worn regular clothes, a shirt and tie and all that. But for the wedding reception, I was decked out in full Highland dress, complete with kilt, sporran, sgian dubh, the whole nine yards. Leen and I were even piped into the hall. I wore the MacLeod tartan, something I had long before promised my mother I would do, to honour her family. But while I was honouring my mother’s family, and perhaps following traditions once followed by my ancestors, I was really doing something that people in my family probably hadn’t done for over two hundred years. I was recreating a romanticised version of my family history, though I have no regrets for having done so.

I wore the 'hunting tartan' of Clan MacLeod at our wedding reception.

Duncan was born in 1890 in that small, Catholic, Gaelic-speaking community the MacLeods had settled into. My grandfather once told me that Duncan, his uncle, had joined a local Highland regiment during World War I and had been given a kilt as part of his dress uniform. As the story goes, the war ended just as Duncan was walking off the ship in England, so he turned around and walked right back on and went home. His kilt was hung on a wall in his living room, where it remained for several years. He had only worn it a few times.

Duncan, who was noted for his strength and also for his fiddle-playing, married and moved to Cochrane Ontario, where he worked in a mine. It was his job to set explosive charges in the mine. On September 26th, 1928, he set a charge but it didn’t go off. When he went back down to see what the problem was, the charge blew, and ended the life of Duncan MacLeod. He was 37 years old. My grandfather, born the previous year, was named after him. Knowing this, it’s easy to see the connection between my grandfather and the earliest known Duncan MacLeod in our family: Papa was named after his uncle, who was probably named after his grandfather, the Duncan MacLeod who migrated to Cape Breton, who was probably named after his grandfather, Duncan MacLeod of Skye, who fought at the Battle of Culloden.

I don’t know the whole story, really. And I don’t know what happened to the kilt that was hanging on the wall of the MacLeods’ home in Upper Southwest Mabou. The kilt I wore was returned to the place I had rented it from the day after the wedding reception.

Papa’s uncle Robert MacLeod, who died on April 5th 1987 at the age of 71, was a member of the Cape Breton Highlanders during World War II. As a member of that regiment, he may have worn a kilt as well.

But that’s a story for another day.

After watching Monsters Vs. Aliens, Al and I were playing with some of his toys.

Me (holding the head of a robot dinosaur): Hey guys!

Al (holding a transformer in one hand and a generic Voltron-like robot in the other): Hey!

Me: What’s your name?

Al: My name Robot.

Me: OK. And how about you? What’s your name?

Al: My name Transformer.

Me: Wow, you guys have such original names.

Al: What’s your name?

Me: Uh…Robot Dinosaur…Head.

Al: Robot Dinosaur Head. Haha! (That’s two-year-old-speak for ‘Wow Daddy, that’s such an original name.’)

Last night, after a good workout at the gym, Leen and I were on our way home when in the course of a conversation about post-workout close physical proximity I joked, “Well, it’s not like you have cooties.”

I expected her to ask me something like, “What the heck are cooties?” But instead she said, “I had that once when I was a kid, actually.” I was surprised to hear someone say they’ve actually had cooties, considering it’s an imaginary affliction, used by kids in the west as an excuse for shunning and/or teasing other kids. But Leen wasn’t talking about that. She was talking about the very real skin infection known in Malay as kudis.

So we talked about kudis for a bit and it seemed quite plausible to me that the imaginary western affliction known as cooties came from kudis. But I’ve been wrong about stuff like this before (after hearing several times from several sources that the word bogeyman had something to do with colonial powers’ fear of the Bugis, I wrote about it and was corrected by those who knew the word actually had English origins from way back; one of those who corrected me was a linguist who seemed really annoyed by the perpetuation of the Bugis myth). Whatever the case, I wanted to check it out.

The Wikipedia article on cooties is a mess. There’s no mention of Malaya/Malaysia, but that’s not necessarily a refutation of the kudis connection, considering how dodgy the etymology section of the article is. There is, however, an external link at the bottom of the article that goes to a page at The Straight Dope. There, in a piece from 1985, someone replies to a question about the origins of the word cooties by saying:

Cooties in the sense of “an intangible profusion of vileness emanating from an especially loathsome individual” is probably peculiar to this country. However, cooties in the original sense of body lice is known to most speakers of English. According to Eric Partridge, whose knowledge of things linguistic is almost as awesome as my knowledge of things in general, the word cooties, and probably the reality as well, was picked up by sailors from the Malayans, who had a similar word meaning dog lice. A possibly related term is kutu, a Polynesian word meaning lice of any kind.

So there is a known connection between cooties and kudis. A quick look at some entries at Dictionary.com reveals this as well:

coot⋅ie1  [koo-tee] Show IPA
–noun Informal.
a louse, esp. one affecting humans, as the body louse, head louse, or pubic louse.
Also, cooty.

Origin:
1910–15; perh. < Malay kutu biting body louse, with final syll. conformed to -ie

Another mention of Malay origins. Fair enough, but hold on: why is it attributed to the word kutu, which generally refers to lice and other wingless biting insects? Did cooties really come from kutu?

I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate (I’m no linguist, after all) that cooties did actually come from kudis, not from kutu. The association with lice may have something to do with the fact that a certain kind of kudis (kudis buta, known in English as scabies) does involve mites. People I’ve asked about kudis have all told me it’s not contagious, but scabies certainly is (at least through skin contact); if regular kudis is the same as impetigo (it is according to the Malay Wikipedia article on kudis), a bacterial infection, then it can be spread through contact as well. Ease of transmission aside, kudis would be repulsive enough that children afflicted with it would be shunned by their peers, or at the very least teased. We all know how cruel kids can be sometimes. Considering its repulsiveness, and its prevalence among children (like the imaginary cooties, kudis is more common in children than adults, whereas kutu refers to lice and fleas more generally), it makes sense that it would develop into an insult to be used against someone who might not even have the condition (”Stay away from her,” the class jock said, pointing at the nerdy girl, “she has kudis!”).

Cooties could very well be from kutu — after all, the people who wrote that dictionary thought so — but I’m not so sure. Even if kudis is the real origin of cooties, it might be something linguists already know — but again, I’m not so sure. I guess I’ll just have to keep scratching…er, digging.