[Ads-l] the bee's knees (1920)

[Ben Zimmer]

HDAS and OED have "the bee's knees" in the sense of "a superlative
person/thing" from 1923. GDoS has it from 1922 (except for one questionable
outlier -- see below), and Hugo gives some additional cites from that year
in this English Stack Exchange thread:

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/47088/where-does-the-phrase-the-bees-knees-originate-from

In that same thread, Phil M. Jones cites an example from 1920:

---
The National, Nov.-Dec. 1920, p. 358, col. 3
"How Movie Dope is Written," by Stewart Arnold Wright
For lack of something better, I said to [Ernest] Hilliard, "Well, what do
you think of this 'Annabel Lee' picture?"
"It's the bee's knees," he replied. "If it doesn't knock Broadway on its
ear, I'll kiss your Adam's apple in Wanamaker's display window at 12
o'clock noon."
https://books.google.com/books?id=ytVOAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA358
---

Here it is earlier in 1920, quoting a delegate to the Democratic National
Convention in San Francisco:

---
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/24666781/bees_knees/
San Francisco Examiner, July 5, 1920, p. 2, col. 6
First Delegate: "Well, now ain't that the bee's knees! Why, I'm having a
swell time here, Swell. This is a great town."
---

Even earlier that year, in the Feb. 8, 1920 issue of the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, there are references to a vaudeville show called "The Bee's
Knees" (presented by Joe Laurie, Jr.), but there's no indication of whether
the show used it in the superlative sense or for some other fanciful
purpose.

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/24668442/the_bees_knees/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/24668460/the_bees_knees/

I don't see anything clearly related to the superlative sense before that,
though "bee's knees" did appear in various contexts as a kind of nonsense
phrase, as noted by Hugo on English Stack Exchange as well as by The Phrase
Finder:

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-bees-knees.html

GDoS has a dubious cite dated to 1905 in a letter by the Australian folk
singer Duke Tritton:

---
1905 Duke Tritton's Letter n.p.: I'm teaching Mary and all the Tin Lids in
the district to Dark An' Dim, and they reckon I'm the bees knees, ants
pants and nits tits all rolled into one.
---

The full text of the rhyming-slang-stuffed letter can be found here:

https://www.tsukuba-g.ac.jp/library/kiyou/98/12.yokose.pdf

On Twitter, Jonathon Green says that further research has dated the letter
to "somewhere in the teens":

https://twitter.com/MisterSlang/status/1053315085228224513

But even that would be an outlier given that there's no US evidence before
1920 (and there's no evidence that the superlative meaning of the phrase
came from Australia). So either it's a case of independent invention, or
Duke Tritton's letter was actually written later, in the '20s.

--bgz

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