The June 18 edition of the New York Daily News in 1896, did a bit of hoity-toity publishing hocus-pocus that could affect you two ways: either you think everything is still hunky-dory or you might get the heebie-jeebies. The line itself was the seemingly innocent: “Instead of humdrum you..have got harum scarum,” but upon closer examination, you’re right up against it. “It” being the question “why are there so many oddly paired phrases in English beginning with ‘h,’ and why are some of them hyphenated while others aren’t”?
If you came looking for answers to those particular questions, you’ll find no hokey-pokey (which originally meant an ice cream treat) at the end of this. What is clear, though, is that for the most part nobody knows where these phrases came from. “Harum-scarum,” which means reckless or wild (“… to affright or make wild: to go harum starum” — 1691) MIGHT have something to do with how a rabbit or hare dashes away when frightened.
The origin stories of the other phrases also feature some etymological hand-waving. “Hoity-toity,” for example, means “putting on an air of superiority”, and maybe it comes from “hot,” or maybe it comes from “high.” The “high” or “height” camp bolster their argument by citing “highty-tighty,” a variation that appeared in the late 1600s and has been working on disappearing into the hedge ever since.
“Humdrum,” which misplaced its hyphen as a young phrase, showed up in the 1500s and has always meant dull or monotonous. It’s one of the more commonplace of the “h” phrases, but even so, its origin is waved away as “something to do with ‘hum’.” Any drumming that might be involved is glossed over and ignored, which can be a hard thing to do with drumming. An intriguing clue about an unexpected connection appeared in 1710, however: “Your Wiser Rival..Ne’er stood Hum Drum, with Shilly Shally.” Maybe “shilly shally” has something to say about “hum drum”?
Unfortunately it doesn’t — but at least “shilly shally,” which means being undecided, is well understood as coming out of “shall I? shall I?” which you might say while vacillating between options (or, well, you might have if you lived a long time ago). It probably acquired the sing-song alternation of sounds simply because it’s fun to say. After all, you see the same effect in “dilly dally” and “wishy washy.”
“Hunky dory,” which means everything is okay, is interesting because the earliest citation, from 1866, is all about how nobody knows where it came from: “I cannot conceive on any theory of etymology..why anything that is ‘hunkee doree’..should be so admirable.”
“Hocus pocus,” a nonsense phrase magicians used to use, was originally the name of a magician back in the era of King James. This is probably the King James who has a Bible named after him; between 1566 and 1625 he was King James the First of England and Ireland. At the same time he was also King James the Fourth of Scotland — which by itself was a neat trick — compounded by a reign of 59 years when most people didn’t even live that long. Anyway, we don’t know exactly who that original magian was, but he was described in 1655: “I will speak of one man..that went about in King James his time..who called himself, The Kings Majesties most excellent Hocus Pocus…”
By the way, did you notice that bit about “…King James his time…”? Ever wonder why we add an apostrophe and an “s” to make a possessive, thus confusing everybody who thinks adding an “s” in English makes a plural? Me too, but there’s a clue right there. But this is dilly dallying, and we’re not done quite done with “hocus pocus” yet.
Some think that “hocus pocus” is where “hokey pokey” came from — but not the “hokey pokey” that meant ice cream (there was a Hokey Pokey brand of ice cream). It was the “hokey pokey” that meant cheating or swindling. It’s also not the “hokey pokey” that refers to the children’s dance — that one is the center of a bit of controversy. In 1942 Jimmy Kennedy published a song in the UK that was alternately known as cokey-cokey, the okey-cokey, the hokey-cokey, and the hokey-pokey. But it might not have been known as the hokey-pokey until it was confused with the 1949 song by Larry LaPrise published in the US, which was definitely called the hokey pokey. Accusations of plagiarism evidently flew harum-scarum across the Atlantic for quite some time. I don’t know whether it was ever resolved, but by now everything hokey-pokey seems, by some hocus-pocus, to be hunky-dory.
