Help me settle a dispute that’s been raging for most of lunchtime around me:

Is it Hokey Cokey? Hokey Pokey? Hokey Tokey? Or what? Which came first?

We, the citizens of the internet, demand to know the truth.

Update: Google reports the following:

• Hokey Cokey: 1,650: British (?) version: a possible origin? “hokey-cokey is a corruption of the Latin words of consecration - Hoc est corpus: ‘This is my body’. Knees bend, arm stretch, ra-ra-ra……. knees bend is a ridicule of the genuflection of the priest, arm stretch is when he holds up his hands at the point of consecration in the service, and ra-ra-ra is just a mimicry of the Latin words and prayers they didn’t understand.”
• Hokey Pokey: 21,500: American version: a possible origin? “Roland Lawrence LaPrise, concocted the song along with two fellow musicians in the late 1940s for the ski crowd in Sun Valley, Idaho. The group, the Ram Trio, recorded the song in 1949. In 1953, bandleader Ray Anthony bought the rights and recorded The Hokey Pokey on the B-side of another novelty record, The Bunny Hop. After the Ram Trio disbanded in the 1960s, country star Roy Acuff’s publishing company bought the rights to The Hokey Pokey. Copyright 1950, Acuff-Rose Music Inc.”

  Another explanation? “In New Zealand hokey pokey is a confection made from boiling sugar and golden syrup together, and then stirring in baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) which makes it froth. The frothy mass is left to set and go hard, and becomes a hazard to teeth! Kids love it. Hokey pokey is also the name of the most popular flavour of ice cream in New Zealand. Basically it is vanilla ice cream laced with “bullets” of hokey pokey.”

• Hokey Tokey: 19: The new Zealand equivalent - presumably so the dance doesn’t get confused with the icecream (which could just get messy, if you put your left leg in and shook it all about)

Google also demonstrates that putting one’s left leg in is far more popular than the insertion of one’s right leg, while shaking it all about proves to be the most popular activity of all.

Apart from sex, obviously - though I’m sure it’s all just a metaphor for the same thing. That is what it’s all about, in an existential kind of way, isn’t it?