The Bee's Knees

First recorded with its modern "excellent" meaning in a Buffalo, New York newspaper in February 1922, right in the middle of a 1920s fad for nonsense animal-based slang: "the cat's pyjamas," "the cat's whiskers," "the monkey's eyebrows," and plenty more, most of which have since faded out of use. There doesn't appear to be any deep logical connection between bees, knees, and excellence; the appeal was almost certainly just the jaunty rhyme. A once-popular theory claiming the phrase honours 1920s dancer Bee Jackson doesn't work, since the phrase was already in print two years before she became famous. Confusingly, a much older, unrelated use of "bee's knee" from 1797 meant something tiny and insignificant, the exact opposite of today's meaning, showing the phrase was recycled rather than invented from scratch.