It was a nightmare day for US House of Representatives speaker Paul Ryan. With almost 300 ceremonial swearings in of new congressmen to get through on Tuesday, the full reality of his chilly relationship with president-elect Donald Trump must have been weighing on him. More embarrassingly, he was shown to be ignorant of the works of Skippa Da Flippa, Migos, Bow Wow and OG Maco.

Paul Ryan prevents Roger Marshall's son from dabbing during swearing-in Read more

As Ryan was swearing in Kansas congressman Roger Marshall in a mock ceremony, Marshall’s teenage son, Cal, put his nose to his elbow, and pointed his other arm in the opposite direction.

“You sneezing?” Ryan asked. Seventeen-year-old Marshall sheepishly agreed he was. But more sophisticated observers had already recognised that this was not a sternutation, but the dab, a dance craze that has long since slipped its faddish origins to become a dance staple.

Everybody dabs now. Tom Hanks has dabbed, as have LeBron James, Golden Girl Betty White and Bill Gates (though his was less of a dab, more of a wipe). Even Ryan’s foe Hillary Clinton managed to go in for a dab on The Ellen DeGeneres show a full year before she was cast into the dustbin of history.

Like the origins of human language, the true starting point of the dab is hotly disputed. Many date it to Atlantan trap rap crew Migos’s 2015 hit Look At My Dab (Bitch Dab), but it certainly existed in a more subdued, wavy form in a Skippa Da Flippa’s How Fast Can You Count It, back in late 2014.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paul Pogba does the dab. Photograph: Francisco Leong/AFP/Getty Images

Either way, in August 2015, XXL magazine reported: “What started as a regional down South adlib is quickly becoming a masterful manoeuvre in clubs and on street corners.” In November, Cam Newton, quarterback of the Carolina Panthers, had sent it overground, and by mid-2016 he had officially announced his retirement from it.

In the UK, footballers in search of goal celebration memes were the usual Typhoid Marys: Manchester United’s Paul Pogba and Jesse Lingard and Everton’s Romelu Lukaku have all used it as goal celebration fodder. Just recently, Cristiano Ronaldo’s son did it as his dad took home his fourth Ballon d’Or.

It has a longevity most dance moves would cut off their right arm for. In the chronology of silly dancing, its immediate predecessor, the nae nae – as popularised in We Are Toonz’s Drop That NaeNae - was a low-slung pelvis-rotator that required suspension of dignity in all but a select few. Like a nae nae or a whip, dabbing looks cool when lots of people do it simultaneously. But unlike those two, the magic of the dab is that it’s easy. As easy as sneezing into your elbow pit.