Let the re-education begin

Well, it is only day three of Ellyn's schooling and we are already afeared that a future transition into the American schooling culture may be rough.

Today Ellyn came home singing a song that was sung at school--her first exposure to this rollerskating classic. It seemed a familiar ditty up to a certain point.

You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out,
You put your right foot in, and you shake it all around.
You do the hockey-pockey and turn yourself around,
That's what it's all about!

You do the WHAT? The above attempts to capture Ellyn's pronunciation which we take to be her attempt to recreate what she heard from the teachers. 

We wonder: will this get her picked on in the states?

Honestly, from a purely linguistic standpoint we're a bit baffled by this. The letter "o" in Spanish is only ever a long "o", as in, say, the word "hō-key". Why the native Spanish speakers here would pronounce the word "hokey" as "hockey" is beyond us. It may be related to the fact that the letter "h" in Spanish is almost entirely silent except in some loan words like, say, "hockey" for which Spanish has no word of its own (owing in large part, no doubt, to the fact that there are very few Spanish-speaking countries with naturally occurring ice).

To write "hokey-pokey" in a way that a Spanish speaker might pronounce it similarly to how we do in English it would have to look something like this: joqui-poqui. Even at that, the initial "j" would likely be more guttural than we pronounce the initial "h" in English. (For an idea of a guttural "j", think of how some pretentious people pronounce the last two letters of Johann Sebastian Bach's last name). 

(For the further linguistically curious: there is absolutely nothing right about the word "hockey" being used in Spanish. As already mentioned, the "h" is aspirated rather than silent and the "o" is short instead of long. But beyond that, the letter "k" is hardly ever used in Spanish, and consonant clusters like "ck" that produce only one sound are uncommon and "ck" in particular is unheard of. Furthermore, few words in Spanish end in "y".)