Hokey pokey can refer to =
Hokey Pokey, a dance
Hokey pokey (ice cream), a flavour of ice cream in New Zealand
Hokey pokey is also a New Zealand term for Sponge toffee.
A DANCE
The Hokey Pokey (also known as the Hokey-Cokey) is a participation dance that became popular in the USA in the 1950s. Larry LaPrise, Charles Macak and Tafit Baker were granted the copyright for the song in 1950. According to popular legend they created this novelty dance in 1949 as entertainment for the ski crowd at Idaho's Sun Valley resort. However, as the dance was wildly popular with American servicemen and Britons during WWII, this date cannot be correct. There is another contrary belief that states that Robert P. Degan and Joseph P. Brier, both natives of Scranton, Pennsylvania, wrote the original song as confirmed by the U.S. Copyright Office in 1996, thus giving two groups of musicians the rights.. Ray Anthony's big band recording of the song turned it into a nationwide sensation by the mid-1950s (The "Hokey Pokey" appeared on the B side of Anthony's "Bunny Hop" single). Its rights were purchased in the mid-1960s by country-western music star Roy Acuff's publishing company, Acuff-Rose.
I put my right hand in,
I put my right hand out,
I give my right hand a shake,
And I turn it all about.
Dance moves
Participants stand in a big ring formation during the dance. The dance follows the instructions given in the lyrics of the song, which may be prompted by a bandleader or another danceleader.
Specific body parts are named, and these are then sequentially put into the ring, taken out of the ring, and finally wiggled around maniacally inside the ring.
After this is done one raises one's hands up to the side of the head, wiggles them, and turns around in place until the next sequence begins, with a new named body part.
A sample instruction set would be:
You put your left ear in
You put your left ear out
You put your left ear in
And you shake it all about.
You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around
That's what it's all about...
In some cultures, this step is repeated to a new chorus,
Oh, the hokey pokey,
Oh, the hokey pokey,
Oh, the hokey pokey,
That's what it's all about.
In parts of the UK the chorus is entirely different:
Woah, the hokey cokey,
Woah, the hokey cokey,
Woah, the hokey cokey,
Knees bent, arms stretched, ra ra ra!
For this chorus all participants are stood in a circle and hold hands, on each "woah" they all move in toward the centre of the circle and on "the hokey cokey" they all move backwards out again. On the last line they bend knees then stretch arms, as indicated, and for "ra ra ra!" they either clap in time or raise arms above their heads and push upwards in time. More often than not, each subsequent verse and chorus is a little faster, with the ultimate aim of making people fall over.
ICE CREAM
Hokey pokey is a flavour of ice cream sold in New Zealand; according to the New Zealand Ice Cream Manufacturers Association [1], it is the nation's second most popular ice cream flavour, after vanilla. It has small, solid lumps of toffee in it — usually harder than the sponge toffee confection also known as "hokey pokey" in New Zealand.
"Hokey pokey" was a slang term for ice cream in general in several areas — including New York [2] and parts of Great Britain — in the 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries, and 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. It may have come from the term "hocus-pocus", or it may be a corruption of one of several Italian phrases.
SPONGE TOFFE
New Zealand's hokey pokey ice cream, despite sharing its name with a New Zealand term for sponge toffee, is generally made with hard toffee.
Sponge toffee (also known as honeycomb toffee, cinder toffee, hokey pokey in New Zealand, sponge candy in Erie, Pennsylvania and Buffalo, New York, or occasionally sea foam in Oregon and California) is a sugary confection with a light, rigid, foam-like texture, and is very sticky due to its sugar content.