Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty. Last week, we talked about bee-related idioms,

but I saved the bees' knees for this week because it's big enough to stand on its own.

And after we're done with that, we'll talk about the specific language of recipes.

And for those of you that had questions about the Troops episode last week, I think I'll get

to those next week or maybe the week after.

Imagine arriving late for dinner in 1902 and your friend saying, not to worry, he's already

ordered you bees' knees and canary bird's

tongues. Well, that wasn't a real meal, but it was part of the strange early life of the phrase

the bees' knees. Today, it means something fantastic. You're the bees' knees, darling. But before it became flapper slang,

it was a joke about something tiny, then a joke about rare and ridiculous delicacies, and somehow,

for more than a hundred years, people kept putting bees' knees on toast. So today, we're looking at how an insect's body part,

and bees really do have knees, or at least something like them, they have a joint where their

little legs bend, how that part became one of the cheeriest slang phrases of the 1920s.

So first, people talked about just one little knee. If you wanted to say something was tiny in the 1600s and 1700s, you could say it was not even as big as a bee's knee.

Then in the 1800s, the knees doubled, and people began to use the bee's knees to joke about desirable, made-up food that was hard to get or frivolous.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation from 1902 that says, quote,

When one camps for long so far from civilization,

milk and eggs are as unattainable as the proverbial bees' knees and canary bird's tongues, unquote.

And strangely, they have four citations spanning more than a hundred years about bees' knees on toast.

I particularly like one from 1951 that says, quote,

The cook's aides all make ludicrous suggestions such as beesnees on toast,

bobcat pajamas saute, and butterfly pie.

...