Tony F., The following is my feeble attempt to answer the seemingly unanswerable. This is all very, very strange, but it seems there must be some connection. What follows probably isn’t worth much, but as they say, maybe it’s better than a kick in the teeth.
The only connection that I have been able to find involving
ICKY,
ACKY, and
MORE (and thus
ICKYACKYMORE in both the U.K. and the U.S. has to do with children’s games.
I can’t speak for the whole U.S. but in New York City, at least, in the 1940s and 50s, when deciding who was going to be
IT in a game of hide-and-seek or tag (or in other choosing games), we would stand in a circle and put out both fists and the designated person in the middle would chant and hit our fists as each number was spoken:
One potato,
two potato,
three potato,
four /
Five potato,
six potato,
seven potato
MORE.
And the fist that got hit on the word
MORE was dropped and no longer usable. The process would be repeated and when both of your fists were hit you were out of the circle. And the last person left was
IT.
According to an old and lovely book titled
Children’s Games in Street and Playground [[in the U.K.]] (1969) by Iona and Peter Opie, I found that this same ‘potato’ choosing method is/was used in the U.K. and so we have the word
MORE being used in a children’s choosing routine on both sides of the Atlantic.
I also found in the same book another choosing routine:
“Another way a player can condemn himself to the unwanted role [[e.g. being
IT, etc.]] is by the process known as ‘Chinging up’ or ‘Odd Man Out.’ For this operation, much resorted to in greater London, the players stand in a circle facing inwards, with hands behind their back, and chant in unison certain words, which vary from district to district, . . . On the word
out they whip their hands from behind their backs, holding them in front for all to see, either with their fists clenched, or with their fingers stretched out palms downward , or with their hands clenched but first two fingers spread out. Then they look around to see if one player is ‘odd,’ that is to say holding his hands in one of the three positions but different from everyone else, in which case that player becomes ‘ee’ [[“or the one who, as they express it, is ‘on,’ ‘on it,’ ‘he,’ or ‘it’”]]. Alternatively, the players pair off and play against each other, either bringing their hands out from behind their backs, or dabbing them in the air three times in front of them, and making the finger formation at the third dab, synchronizing their movements with three vocables such as ‘
ICK, ACK,
OCK.’”
In NYC we used the somewhat simplified version in which two players decided who was ‘odds’ and who was ‘evens.’ We said ‘once, twice, three (striking our hands in the air two times and putting out either two fingers or one on the final strike and saying) ‘shoot.’ ‘Evens’ corresponded to two players putting out the same number of fingers and ‘odds’ to putting out different numbers of fingers. The one who made the correct prediction won. Pairs of losers would continue to compete until there was one person left, the ‘
IT.’
So, in a children's choosing method in Britain the words
ICK followed by
ACK were known to be used. And the word
MORE was also used as the last word in another choosing method. It doesn’t sound entirely implausible to me that the sequence
ICKY, ACKY, MORE (
ICKYACKYMORE) could have been used in some other children’s choosing routine. And, in fact, I’d be extremely hard-pressed to come up with another explanation that would string these three words together!
Incidentally, in a Google search I did find mention of the game
ICKY ACKY in three recent U.K. posting:
<2007 “Re: How old were u when u had your first fight? umm wen i was about 10 we were playing ICKY ACKY or watever in the playground, i was on and one of the lads who was safe (touchng the wall) pushed me in the back.”—‘ClioSport,’ 16, January> [[(spelling is not this forum’s strong suit; sounds like game of tag in which you are safe when touching the wall]]
<2003-2007? “We were playing ICKY ACKY [although I remember calling it acky acky when i was younger . . . probably a redditch thing.].”—from MySpace.com> [[MySpace founded in 2003; Redditch is a district in north-east Worcestershire, England.]]
<2003-2007? “ICKY ACKY one, two, three, i see liv running towards me . . .”—from MySpace.com>
Now the question is, is there any evidence of the sequence
ICKY ACKY being used in children’s games in the U.S.? And there is! However, the particular example I found hailed from Washington D.C. and was attested to in 1967 (
Dictionary of American Regional English). The words
ICKY-ACKY were called out when children played a game in which they threw a ball over a building. The children on one side would call out
ICKY-ACKY and the children on the other side would respond
OVER and thus the name of the game
ICKY-ACKY-OVER. This game was also variously known, dating back to the 1950s, in other U.S. cities as
ALLEY-OVER,
ALLEY-ALLEY OVER,
OLLY-OLLY OVER, ILLY-ALLY-OVER, or
ANTONY OVER.
So now we have
ICKY ACKY as the leading words and
MORE as the last word of some children’s games – both used on both sides of the Atlantic. But what the heck does this have to do with:
<“the spot of reflected light from (say) a watch glass or a mirror as it dances around the room.”>
Tony, you got me – I never claimed this was gonna be good! (<:)
But, as stated above, it is hard to imagine how else these three words would have come to be strung together. And as for their relationship to your above meaning, the only thing that I can think of is that the activity of the vocalizations
ICKY ACKY (followed by
MORE) and the accompanying excited activity and waving of children’s hands somehow seemed to correspond in the minds of the coiners of the expression (in the U.S. and the U.K.) to the dancing of the reflected spot of light around a room. Somewhat far-fetched, but the coincidence of your tale - upon reflection, so to speak - also seems somewhat far-fetched, so we find ourselves in the grasping-for-straws mode!
Note: I also found instances on the web where
ICKY ACKY appeared to mean
ICKY, distasteful,
YUCKY, but this choice didn’t seem as 'likely' and didn't seem to accommodate the use of the final ‘more’ as well.
_____________________
Ken G - March 30, 2007