G. K. Chesterton used the phrase in his 1906 book Charles Dickens: A Critical Study [2] to “denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle”.
[5] In the door there was an oval glass plate, with COFFEE-ROOM painted on it, addressed towards the street.
If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backward on the wrong side MOOREEFFOC (as I often used to do then…) a shock goes through my blood.It has been noted that the Mooreeffoc effect characterises Charles Dickens' four comic short stories for children of 1868 published as Holiday Romance.
[4] In these, the stories are “told” by child-narrators aged between “half-past six” and nine, and so have a child-like perspective that inverts the narrative “norm”.
[4] J. R. R. Tolkien also used the word in the same sense in his essay "On Fairy-Stories"[6] perhaps picking up on G. K. Chesterton's added observation to the above “this elvish kind of realism … everywhere”.