Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Hokey pokey

 Do any of you remember the song-and-dance "The Hokey Pokey" from your childhood? I do! And for some reason, it's been stuck in my mind for a while now. So, of course, I started to wonder: did the phrase hokey pokey originate from the song that I remember from the 1950s?

Time to do a little research!

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First, a little background on the song, starting with Wikipedia:

The Hokey Cokey (United Kingdom, and the Caribbean) also known as Hokey Pokey (South Africa, United States, Canada, Australia, and Israel) is a campfire song and participation dance with a distinctive accompanying tune and lyric structure. It is well known in English-speaking countries. It originates in a British folk dance, with variants attested as early as 1826. The song and accompanying dance peaked in popularity as a music hall song and novelty dance in the mid-1940s in the UK. The song became a chart hit twice in the 1980s.

Wow... hokey pokey was rumbling around in the early 19th century?? Really, Wikipedia?? I searched some more, and found this from Etymology Online:

hokey-pokey (n). 1847, "false cheap material," perhaps an alteration of hocus-pocus, or from the nonsense chorus and title of a comic song (Hokey Pokey Whankey Fong) that was popular c. 1830. Applied especially to cheap ice cream sold by street vendors (1884). In Philadelphia, and perhaps other places, it meant shaved ice with artificial flavoring. The words also were the title of a Weber-Fields musical revue from 1912. The modern dance song of that name hit the U.S. in 1950 ("Life" described it Nov. 27, 1950, as "a tuneless stomp that is now sweeping the U.C.L.A. campus"). But a dance of that name, to a similar refrain, is mentioned in a 1943 magazine article (wherein the "correct" title is said to be Cokey Cokey), and the dance is sometimes said to have originated in Britain in World War II, perhaps from a Canadian source.

On a different Wikipedia page, I discovered that, in New Zealand, hokey pokey is a term for a very specific flavor of ice cream—vanilla with bits of honeycomb toffee. The entry continues:

...hokey pokey was a slang term for ice cream in general in the 19th and early 20th centuries in several areas — including New York City and parts of Great Britain—specifically for the ice cream sold by street vendors, or "hokey pokey men". The vendors, said to be mostly of Italian descent, supposedly used a sales pitch or song involving the phrase hokey pokey, for which several origins have been suggested. One such song in use in 1930s Liverpool was "Hokey pokey penny a lump, that's the stuff to make ye jump."

I don't know about you, but I find all this fascinating. From its early-19th-century emergence as a folk dance, to a dismissive term for ratty-tatty material, to an ice cream flavor, and finally to a "modern" 1950s dance, this simple little phrase has had quite the linguistic journey!

Now, doesn't that just make you want to jump up and do the hokey-pokey?? (And maybe have some ice cream afterwards!)

The Hokey Pokey, 1953 ... This is the version *I* remember!