I know we’re on the eve of a new series, but cast your minds back to the last episode of Answer Me This!, listeners, which was number 84, in which we quizzed special guest Josie Long about these nameless things. Well, Jenn from Santa Cruz has emailed in to tell us what is possibly their actual name:
I can’t speak for all of the United States of course, but where I grew up they were called ‘cootie catchers’. Why? I don’t know.
What an attractive term. It sounds like it should denote something they use to mop up at the STD clinic, not an innocent origami toy popular with 8-year-old girls. Anyway, on the same subject, Amy writes:
After listening to your most recent podcast with the question about the little paper origami devices used to precariously predict one’s destiny, I found them for sale (!) in the shop Paperchase. They called them Fortune Pickers. They were part of a Valentine’s gift range. What a perfect way of telling someone that not only are you a cheapskate, but you are a lazy, uncreative cheapskate.
Thoroughly lame indeed. If you’re too lazy even to make something that a tiny child could make with just one sheet of A4, then you ought not have someone to whom to give such a pisspoor Valentine’s present. If you desperately want one of these paper prognosticators but you’re genuinely too busy and important to fold it yourself, send this link to your secretary and instruct him/her to manufacture one on your behalf out of a discarded fax or £50 note.
UPDATE: Clarrie from London adds:
My french family all call it a “cocotte” – which incidentally also means a prostitute or promiscuous woman. NOT SO INNOCENT NOW THEN!!!
Lawks!
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