the.com/hokey pokey

means A children's participatory dance in which you put various body parts in and out of a circle, shake them about, and turn yourself around — and that's what it's all about.

from The name is delightfully tangled. "Hokey pokey" was once a 19th-century term for cheap street ice cream, possibly mangled from an Italian vendor's cry (one popular guess is "o che poco," "oh how little" — though that's folk explanation, not proven). More broadly the phrase echoes "hocus pocus," the old conjurer's nonsense, so it carries a whiff of trickery and sham. How it attached to the dance is murky: the song surfaced in the mid-20th century, with rival British and American claims to its authorship, and "hokey cokey" is the common British variant. In short, a name borrowed from ice cream, magic, and a good-natured argument over who invented it.