telophase: (Default)
telophase ([personal profile] telophase) wrote2011-11-12 11:12 am
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Dear Etsy Crafters...

...While I do appreciate your ideas and abilities in making nifty wedding stuff, sometimes I question your naming choices. For example, the little folded whatsit that kids use in grade school to make predictions*. It's kind of nifty to make customised wedding-themed ones, and I kind of like the idea as I am interested in children's folklore and folk ways from way back, but I really think you should re-think giving it the name traditional in some areas of cootie-catcher. Apparently you are not aware that the term "cooties" does not, in fact, refer only to little innocuous invisible agents of contamination that kids squeal about, but originally referred to body lice.

Not interested in having lice mentioned at my wedding, thankyouverymuch.



* Mary and Herbert Knapp call it the "wiggle-waggle paper predictor" in their classic on kids' folklore One Potato, Two Potato: The Folklore of American Children, but admit it's their own name and that the kids don't have a name for it.
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ashenmote: Animated: Ally Sheedy, chainsmoking and rolling eyes. (Z Aunt O-Ume 2)

[personal profile] ashenmote 2011-11-12 11:50 pm (UTC)(link)
When I was a kid, we called the folded whatsits 'Himmel und Hölle', Heaven and Hell. But I like "wiggle-waggle paper predictor".

[identity profile] movingfinger.livejournal.com 2011-11-12 06:01 pm (UTC)(link)
Those were called fortunetellers in our school.

[identity profile] telophase.livejournal.com 2011-11-12 06:12 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm trying to remember if we called them that or if we just didn't have a name.

[identity profile] mvmarcz.livejournal.com 2011-11-12 06:49 pm (UTC)(link)
I call them both, did one as an art book for school full of fortune cookie fortunes

[identity profile] madame-manga.livejournal.com 2011-11-13 03:36 am (UTC)(link)
In the Midwest we called 'em cootie-catchers (and in my elementary school, girls actually used them to grab people's hair and pretend to find lice, which we would draw on the inside!) so I got nuffin'...

How about 'fortune-catcher'? :D

[identity profile] lady-ganesh.livejournal.com 2011-11-13 03:46 am (UTC)(link)
Plus, cooties were something you usually got from the opposite sex. I suppose it might be delightfully subversive at a same-sex wedding, but it seems a bit inappropriate at an opposite-sex marriage.

[identity profile] maxineofarc.livejournal.com 2011-11-13 05:13 am (UTC)(link)
Cootie-catchers. Even when used to tell fortunes.

[identity profile] espion.livejournal.com 2011-11-13 01:35 pm (UTC)(link)
Congrats on the wedding!! Wedding planning is frustrating, expensive, and crazy - but the day is complete awesome-sauce. (We called ours "fortune tellers".)

[identity profile] telophase.livejournal.com 2011-11-17 09:50 pm (UTC)(link)
Thanks! :)
ext_6284: Estara Swanberg, made by Thao (Default)

[identity profile] estara.livejournal.com 2011-11-13 08:16 pm (UTC)(link)
Interesting: the name in my childhood was Heaven & Hell - Himmel und Hölle ^^
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