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

[Ben Zimmer]

Thanks, Peter! That one had eluded my searches. Here's the Newspaper.com
clipping:

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/24670931/bees_knees/


On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 3:42 PM Peter Reitan <pjreitan at hotmail.com> wrote:

> "Bees knees" superlative US 1919.  In a golfing anecdote about the most
> amazing wind-affected shot ever:
>
> Sioux City Journal, July 17, 1919, page 12.
>
> [Begin excerpt] "But that was not the worst one.  Another time I saw a man
> taking his approach shot, and he made a good one, but as Col. Bogey is my
> judge, the wind caught that ball and carried it all the way back to the tee
> from which he started."
>
> As Eddie Styles would say, that one was the bees' knees.
> [End excerpt]
>
> Eddie Styles was a well-known golfer at the time.
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Ben
> Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM>
> Sent: Friday, October 19, 2018 12:22 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: the bee's knees (1920)
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      the bee's knees (1920)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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