It doesn’t seem to have any basis I can think of. Is it used only in the US? And don’t give me any fish story.
We needed an antonym to “snack”.
I made it up. You can ask anyone.
For reasons I can’t imagine, Americans had a fad for baby talk after WWI. That etymonline link puts “icky-boo” around 1920. Helen Kane became famed for her baby talk routine and “boop-oop-a-doop” catchphrase, which spawned the Betty Boop of cartoons.
Dorothy Parker spoofed Winnie the Pooh with:
“And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.”
It lasted quite a while. In the 1932 Horsefeathers, college widow Connie tries to sweet talk college president Groucho into revealing football secrets.
Connie: “If icky baby don’t learn about the football signals, icky baby gonna cwy.”
Professor Wagstaff: “If icky girl keep on talking that way, big stwong man’s gonna kick all of her teef wight down her fwoat.”
Yeah, as this example illustrates, “icky” in US-English “baby talk” (like synonymous “ickle”, see e.g. Seventeen (1916) by Booth Tarkington) seems to have originated as a variant of “little”, rather than in its later sense of “disgusting, displeasing”.
How the transition in meaning seems to have happened, according to Lexicographer at Large:
(And in fairness to A.A. Milne, there really isn’t any baby-talk per se in the Pooh books, just plenty of Whimsical Neologisms and Spurious Capitalization. Parker, of course, was a reviewer with a notoriously low whimsy tolerance.)
Participation excluded on a technicality.
Interesting, as I thought it came from just a disgust reaction onomatapeia, at least in part. My sighs can sound like ichhh.
I had heard of ickle being baby talk for little, but I do wonder how it got from there to disgust. I find myself wondering if there aren’t two parallel origins.
My Aunt had a Lhasa/shih tzu mix named Icky when I was a kid. That little dog is all I think about when I hear that word. I have no idea where she came up with the name.
Did the dog shuffle?
I always thought it was derived from the Knights who say “Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptang Zoo Boing!”
Actually, looks like we can push back the use of “icky” to mean “repulsive” somewhat earlier than those 1930s citations. The 1929 early sound film The Great Gabbo with Erich von Stroheim has a ventriloquist’s dummy (long story) singing “The Lollipop Song” which includes these lyrics (starting about 0:26:30):
Very nice!
ISWYD
Both of you.