bee's knees

An English honey bee (Apis mellifera)

8 May 2024

Most people associate the bee’s knees, meaning something that is excellent or otherwise superlative, with the Roaring ’20s and the Jazz Age. But while the phrase did come into its present-day meaning shortly before and experienced a rise in popularity during that era, it has precursor meanings that predate it by a considerable number of years. And while it is popularly considered to be an Americanism, early uses can be found in Australia, Ireland, and Britain, making the region of origin difficult to pin down. The phrase is often attributed to cartoonist Thomas Aloysius “Tad” Dorgan, but while he may have used the phrase, he did not coin it.

The phrase is first attested to the late eighteenth century in the sense of something very small. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, it came to refer to some nonsense thing, and a decade or so later the present-day sense of something excellent appeared. There is some evidence that this sense of bee’s knees was popular among American doughboys during the First World War, and that sense ballooned among the general public in the post-war years, as the soldiers returned from service.

The bee’s knees is only the one of the more popular and long-lasting in a series of animal phrases constructed with the definite article the, such as the cat’s pajamas. Others include the antelope’s tonsils, bullfrog’s beard, canary’s tusks, caterpillar’s camisole / kimono / spats, cat’s cuffs / kneeknuckles / lingerie / nightgown / tonsilitis / vest, clam’s cuticle / garters, crocodile’s adenoids, duck’s quack, elephant’s tonsils, frog’s eyebrows, kipper’s knickers, kitten’s vest, lion’s bathrobe, oyster’s eyetooth, pig’s scream / whiskers, sandfly garters, snake’s eyebrows, and sparrow’s chirp. It's easy to see how the idea of such rare or impossible things could give rise to a phrase denoting something that is exceptional or especially noteworthy.

The earliest use of bee’s knees, actually a reference to it being used, that I’m aware of is in an 1896 issue of the British journal Notes and Queries. The writer is citing a letter written to his grandmother, dated 27 June 1797:

A ”Bee’s Knee” (8th S. x. 92, 199).—I find the phrase “As big as a bee’s knee” in a letter from Mrs. Townley Ward to her sister, my grandmother, dated 27 June, 1797: “It cannot be as big as a bee’s knee.”

Notes and Queries is a long-running (since 1849) scholarly journal that publishes informal notes and questions about language, literature, and history to which other readers respond. It is, essentially, the print precursor of an internet message board or social media site. It’s still being published, although the internet has short-circuited its utility as a research tool.

This use of bee’s knee (it is usually in the singular in this sense) as a comparison to something very small would continue through to the twentieth century. I have an American usage from Philadelphia’s Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post of 12 November 1831:

Waiter; walk a kidney three times before the fire, and bring it me with a shallot as hot as the first broadside; and, d’ye hear, put a bite of butter not bigger than a bee’s knee on the bilge of it; mind that!

And there is this from The Great Metropolis, published in New York City in 1837, but the account is about London, and this is probably an American reprint of an originally British book:

“Ned, my jolly old fellow,” said one cartman to another, as they both sat quaffing a pot of porter in the tap-room—“Ned, von’t [sic] you have a slice of this here loaf?

“I’m not a bit hungry,” said Ned.

“Take a slice; there’s a good fellow.”

“Well, if I do,” said Ned, “let it be only the bigness of a bee’s knee.”

But at the turn of twentieth century the plural bee’s knees began to be used to refer to some fantastic or fanciful object, often a jocular stand-in for some exotic and foreign foodstuff. This new sense would seem to be a generalization of something absurdly small to something just absurd, often some exotic foodstuff. The earliest use of this sense that I’m aware of is from the Daily Globe of Fall River, Massachusetts of 5 September 1901:

A large plate glass window in Holden & Hindle’s store was broken about 11.15 o’clock last night. George Borden, of Westport, vender of watercress, bee’s knees, clam’s ankles, etc., did the trick, but he claims it was purely accidental.

And the next year there is this in the 27 October 1902 issue of the Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle:

In another of the dozen or so artictles [sic] about the Eagle in Saturday morning’s paper, Mr. Hinkley states that he will pave between the tracks IF Mr. Butts is elected. If we thought for a single minute that this would be done, hand if we wouldn’t vote for Allison. Such a proposition is about as safe as the man who went into a restaurant and offered $100 for some fried bee’s knees.

And writer Zane Grey used the phrase in his 1909 short story The Short Stop. Grey was chiefly known for his novels about the American West, but he had played baseball for the University of Pennsylvania and for several years in the minor leagues, and this story is about the sport, although the passage in question has nothing to do with baseball:

“Wall, how's things? Ploughin’ all done? You don’t say. An’ corn all planted? Do tell! An’ the ham-trees growing all right?

“Whet?” questioned the farmer, plainly mystified, leaning forward.

“How’s yer ham-trees?”

“Never heard of sich.”

“Wall, don-gone me! Why over in Indianer our ham-trees is sproutin’ powerful. An’ how about bee’s knees? Got any bee’s knees this spring?”

On the other end of the literary spectrum we find this in the 1 September 1910 issue of the Mirror, the newspaper of the prison in Stillwater, Minnesota:

Oliver Twist of the Steward’s department informed us that he will tender a banquet to The Mirror Sporting Writers’ Association and forwards a copy of the menu which we publish below:

Mock Duck Soup.
Young Onion Tops (decapitated)
Spinach a la Si Haskell
Seedless Orange Seeds Stewed
Broiled Bees’ Knees
Fried Ice Cream
New Potato Peelings a la Olive
Rimless Doughnuts
Distilled Water

And there is this that appeared in Nevada’s Tonopah Daily Bonanza of 14 August 1912. The article is an opinion piece supporting Clarance Darrow’s defense of the McNamara brothers, labor unionists who detonated a bomb at the Los Angeles Times newspaper in 1910, killing twenty-one people. Darrow managed to get them a plea deal that spared them from the death penalty:

I do not favor violence. I have fought labor unions all my life. I drew up the famous anti-picketing ordinance, yet I had walked the streets all day trying to sell my labor to feed my hungry and crying babies, and couldn’t get work, while others were living on bees’ knees, humming bird’s tongues and giving monkey dinners. I would commit violence. I would tear the front off the first national bank with my finger nails.

A few years earlier, starting in 1905, we get a series of Australian uses of the phrase. The first, and most interesting, is in a 3 March 1905 letter by folk-singer Harold Percival “Duke” Tritton. The letter, which is filled with slang, was found among his papers following his death in 1965 and mined by lexicographers for the verbal treasures it contains:

And I am popular with the family, and the neighbours. So everything is Jakalorum. 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.

Tritton seems to be using bee’s knees in the superlative sense, which would make it, by several years, the earliest such use. But it also refers to the earlier sense of size with its association with ants pants and nits tits. That would make it something of a transitional use between the two senses, but its appearance in Australia is puzzling. Did the later sense develop there first? Or was the superlative sense in use on several continents before it started appearing in print?

A few months later we get another Australian sense, but this one seems to be a nonce use, a confusion with another term. The music column of Adelaide’s Evening Journal of 19 August 1905 has this:

Detail of a purfling in a violin’s mitre or bee sting (bee’s knee?)

However, among the characteristic features of a Stradivarius violin are the bees knees of the pfurling [sic], which are kept closer to the inner corners than in most instruments, and hence display a greater margin of wood on the outer edges of the corners.

Purfling are the thin, inlaid strips of wood running on the edges and backs of stringed instruments. The purfling is not merely decorative, but also protects the wood from cracks as it ages and may have an effect on the tone of the instrument. The pointed edges of the instruments where the two ends of the purfling connect, usually known as the mitre, is also commonly called the bee sting. The use of bees knees in this article would appear to be an error for bee sting. I know of no other uses of bees knees in this musical sense.

After that false alarm, we get another anomalous use in Perth’s Truth of 20 January 1906. A reader replies to another reader’s request for information with this:

“Inquirer” (Kalgoorlie): 1. Yes; bee’s knees are the latest. 2. Mr. G. Thyne, of Messrs. D. and W. Murray, Kalgoorlie, should be able to advise you on the subject.

This newspaper column is analogous to Notes and Queries, with readers asking questions and getting responses from others. Unfortunately, I cannot locate the original question from the Inquirer in Kalgoorlie, so what is meant by bee’s knees here is, for the moment at least, unknown.

Another anomalous use is in a series of classified ads in Victoria’s Bendigo Advertiser starting on 27 September 1910 that ran for several months. The ad is for a clothing store, but what exactly is meant by the phrase isn’t clear from the available context:

BEES Knees to You I’m off to Wilkins and Jones’s for my Summer Suit Busy B. Charing X.

Duke Tritton’s 1905 use of the phrase might be the earliest in the superlative sense, but the first unambiguous use in that sense actually comes from England. It appears in a short piece about a local bakery in the Woolwich Gazette and Plumstead News of 5 July 1910:

1917 drawing of several members of a newly formed US Army unit from Scranton, Pennsylvania that describes one man as the “bee’s knees of the new unit.”

Genuine Scotch shortbread is difficult to obtain in this district. Lots of substitutes are passed off on the too readily believing public, but poor stuff they are at the best. However, there is one place, at any rate, where this delicious edible can be had in its proper crispness and flavour. Mr. George Paterson’s 13, Eton Road, Plumstead. The real “bee’s knee” it is. Besides shortbread Mr. Paterson—who, by the by, was manager of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative bakery for we don’t know how many years—makes specialities of wedding, birthday, and christening cakes, breakfast scones and rolls, and Scotch hot pies.

Since it’s a reference to food, it may be a transitional use from the sense of an exotic foodstuff, although how exotic Scottish shortbread would be to 1910 Londoners is open to question. But in any case, this use in a local London paper, along with Tritton’s use five years earlier in Australia, throws a monkey wrench into the idea of the phrase being an Americanism.

The first American use of bee’s knees in the superlative sense that I’ve found is in a cartoon in Pennsylvania’s Scranton Republican of 15 August 1917. The cartoon depicts several members of a newly formed US Army unit from Scranton and describes one man as the “bee’s knees of the new unit.” It is also the first one associated with World War I.

Another First World War usage is found in the January 1918 issue of Treat ’Em Rough, the unit magazine of the US Army Tank Corps training facility in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. A unit that, incidentally, was commanded by Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower:

Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower (1918), commander of the US Army tank corps training school at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Lieut. McNamara is the bee’s knees when it comes to drilling. 1-2-3-4, hep, hep, tell the sergeant to get in step. What he don’t know about drilling isn’t worth knowing.

The use of the phrase would explode over the coming decade as the soldiers came home from the war. Damon Runyan penned this fictional conversation between two delegates to a political convention in his 5 July 1920 syndicated column:

Second Delegate—"There’s plenty doing in Springfield for me. I’m sick and tired of staying around here. You must be nutty to want to stay.”

First Delegate—"Well, now, ain’t that the bee’s knees! Of course, I don’t get to the convention much, but everybody knows I’m for Jimmy Cox and they vote me that way whether I'm there or not. Why I’m having a swell time here.”

Runyan wasn’t the first to use phrase, nor was he the only major writer of the era to use the new superlative sense of bee’s knees, but his column was printed in papers across the United States and marked the sense’s entry into print discourse and eventually an indelible association with the Jazz Age.

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Sources:

“304 Battalion. Co. B.” 37/1. Treat ’Em Rough (US Army Tank Corps, Camp Colt, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania), January 1918, 37/1. ProQuest Magazines.

“Among the Politicians.” Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle (New York), 27 October 1902, 5/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Bobbles.” Mirror (Stillwater, Minnesota), 1 September 1910, 4/3. Newspaper Archive.com.

“Chapter VII: Metropolitan Society—The Lower Class.” The Great Metropolis. New York: Theodore Foster, 1837 161. In Foster’s Cabinet Miscellany, vol. 5. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society. (The dates are a bit confused here. The book has a title page with the 1837 date, but volume of Foster’s Cabinet Miscellany in which it is enclosed bears a date of 1836.)

Classified advertisement. Bendigo Advertiser (Victoria), 27 September 1910, 6/3. NewspaperArchive.com.

“Declares Darrow Did Remarkable Thing in Saving Lives of the M’Namara Brothers.” Tonopah Daily Bonanza (Nevada), 14 August 1912, 1/2. NewspaperArchive.com.

“East End Echoes.” Daily Globe (Fall River, Massachusetts), 5 September 1901, 7/1. Newspapers.com.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. bee’s knees, n.

Grey, Zane. “The Short Stop.” Pittsburg Press (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), 11 October 1909, 6/6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Motor Truck Unit Enjoys Jolly Time.” Scranton Republican (Pennsylvania), 15 August 1917, 4/6. Newspapers.com.

“Musical Notes.” Evening Journal (Adelaide, South Australia), 19 August 1905, 6/4. NewspaperArchive.com.

“Our Letter-box. Answers to Correspondents.” Truth (Perth, Western Australia), 20 January 1906, 3/4. NewspaperArchive.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bee, n.1.

“Replies.” Notes and Queries, 8.248. 26 September 1896, 260. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

Runyan, Damon. “Two Delegates Talk” (4 July 1920). Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), 5 July 1920, 4/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Seen and Heard.” Prahran Telegraph (Melbourne, Victoria), 24 April 1909, 5/1. NewspaperArchive.com.

“Tol Lol Penny.” Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), 12 November 1831, 4/2. ProQuest Magazines.

“Trade Touches.” Woolwich Gazette and Plumstead News (England), 5 July 1910, 4/7. British Newspaper Archive.

Tritton, Harold Percival “Duke.” Letter, 3 March 1905. In John Meredith, Dinkum Aussie Slang: A Handbook of Australian Rhyming Slang (1984), Kenthurst, New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 1993, 12–15 at 15. Archive.org.

Image credits: Honey bee: Charles J. Sharp, 2014. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en; Violin: Rocket12793, 2019, Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license; Eisenhower: Treat ’Em Rough, 1 January 1918, 3. Public domain image; Scranton Republican (Pennsylvania), 15 August 1917. Public domain image.

creek / up shit's creek

6 May 2024

I had no idea that British usage of creek was different from the use of the word in the rest of the English-speaking world until I was translating an Old Norse work (appropriately enough regarding the discovery and exploration of Vinland) and found that my Old Norse dictionary, produced in the UK, translated the word vágr as “bay, creek.” Unsure what was intended, a bay or a creek, I did some digging and discovered in British dialect the two words were synonyms. (Just to be clear, there is no etymological connection with the Old Norse vágr; creek is simply a translation.)

British and American pronunciation also differs. In British English, the vowel in creek is longer. (In linguistics, vowel length is not what you were taught when learning to read. A long vowel is just that—it takes longer to utter; there is no change in the vowel sound.) British pronunciation is generally /kriːk/, while American pronunciation is usually /krik/. (These are both “short” vowels in the sense you were probably taught in school.) In some American dialects the word is pronounced with a different vowel, /krɪk/ or “crick.”

The early history of the word is somewhat hazy, but it is probably from a Germanic root, probably the Old Norse kriki, meaning nook or bend, which would make it related to crook. English acquired the word from the French crique in the thirteenth century, and in Middle English the word was generally spelled with an < i >. At the same time the Anglo-Latin creca appears. In the sixteenth century, the word was borrowed again, this time from the Dutch kreke (modern Dutch kreek), and the spelling began to shift from < i > to < e >.

All these early uses, including those in French, Anglo-Latin, and Dutch are in the sense of an inlet, bay, or cove. One of its earliest appearances in English is in the c.1300 poem Havelok the Dane:

Hise ship he greythede wel inow;
He dede it tere an ful wel pike
That it ne doutede sond ne krike;
Therinne dide a ful god mast,
Stronge kables and ful fast,
Ores gode an ful god seyl—
Therinne wantede nouth a nayl,
That evere he sholde therinne do.

(His ship was supplied well enough;
He sealed it very well with tar and pitch
So it should fear neither sound nor creek;
Therein he installed a very good mast,
And strong cables, very fast,
Good oars and a very good sail—
It wanted nary a nail,
If he should ever need one.)

The sense of creek meaning a small river or stream appears first in North America, but it also is found in Australian and New Zealand speech. The sense is an extension of the sense of inlet or bay; European explorers would use the word to designate a cove, only to find it being fed by a river, and the name creek was transferred to it.

The stream sense appears by 1622 in Captain Nathaniel Butler’s “Unmasked Face of Our Colony in Virginia as It Was in the Winter of the Year 1622.” Butler was governor of Bermuda and had a brief visit to the Jamestown colony that year. This is taken from an April 1623 transcription of Butler’s work in the The Records of the Virginia Company of London (I cannot find a version of the original that does not have modernized spelling and other editorial interventions):

Ther Howses are generally the worst yt euer I sawe ye meanest Cottages in England beinge euery way equall (if not superior) with ye moste of the best, And besides soe improuidently and scattringly are they seated one from an other as partly by their distance but especially by the interpositc[i]on of Creeks and Swamps as they call them they offer all aduantages to their sauadge enimys & are vtterly depriued of all suddaine recollection of themselues vppon any tearmes whatsoeuer.

And creek appears in this passage describing the English colony in New England appears in Philip Vincent’s 1637 account of the Pequot War:

In a word, they have built faire Townes of the lands owne materials, and faire Ships to, some where of are here to be seene on the Thames. They have overcome cold and hunger, are dispearsed securely in the Plantations sixty miles along the coast, and within the Lan also along some small Creekes and Rivers, and are assured of their peace by killing the Barbarians, better than our English Virginians were by being killed by them.

The phrase up shit’s creek is a nineteenth-century Americanism meaning in trouble, facing a predicament. The phrase is often bowdlerized by omitting the shit’s or, in early print appearances, replacing it with salt. The earliest known use of up shit’s creek that I know of is from 1868. It appears in the testimony of Augustus Lorins, a freedman, who was testifying about the 4 June 1868 murders of Solomon Dill, a US congressman from South Carolina, and a Nestor Ellison, a freedman. The men were probably murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. Lorins’s testimony appears in the Secretary of War’s report to Congress for 1868:

On or about the 15th of May I went to Mr. Dill’s house. On my return to the plantation of Mr. E. Parker, he said to me: “Well, Augustus, what did Mr. Dill have to say?” I told him. “What else,” said Parker. I replied, I saw some pictures of Mr. Lincoln. He, Parker, then said, “well, our men put old Lincoln up Shit creek, and we’ll put old Dill up.”

One can be up shit’s creek without a paddle. Mentions of paddles in the phrase date to at least 1930.

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Sources:

“At a Court Held for Virginia on Wedensday in the Afternoone the Last of Aprill 1623” (30 April 1623). The Records of the Virginia Company of London, vol. 2. Sarah Myra Kingsbury, ed. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1906, 379–89 at 383. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018, s.v. creca, n. Brepolis: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. creek, n., shit creek, n.

“Havelok the Dane.” In Four Romances of England. Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury, eds. University of Rochester: TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997, lines 707–14.

Message of the President of the United States and Accompanying Documents to the Two Houses of Congress. Third Session, Fortieth Congress. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1868, 480. Google Books.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. crike, n.(1).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. creek, n.1.

Vincent, Philip. A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England, Between the English and the Salvages. London: Marmaduke Parsons for Nathanael Butter and John Bellamie, 1637, 20. Archive.org.

Photo credit: US Army photo, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

zirconium / zircon / hyacinth

A blue zircon

3 May 2024

Zirconium is a chemical element with atomic number 40 and the symbol Zr. It is a lustrous, gray-white metal. The mineral zirconium silicate, also known as zircon, is common in the earth’s crust and has been known since antiquity. Zirconium has a variety of commercial uses, and zircon crystals are considered gemstones.

The etymology follows a rather tortuous route. Zircon is a modern borrowing from the German, which is itself a borrowing from the Italian giargone (fourteenth century), which in turn comes from the Old French jacunce. (In the thirteenth century, Middle English borrowed the French word, forming jacincte and jagounce, but these words didn’t survive into modern English.) The French root comes from the Latin hyacinthus, which in turn is from the Greek ὑάκινθος (hyakinthos). The European words are related to the Arabic الزركون (al zarqūn), although the nature of that connection is uncertain.

The Death of Hyacinth, Alexander Kiselyov, late nineteenth century, oil on canvas

In Greek myth, Hyacinthus was a Spartan prince and lover of Apollo. According to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the two were competing in throwing the discus, but Apollo’s throw accidently struck the prince, killing him. The flower grew on his grave. The hyacinth gemstone is so called because it has the color of the flower.

The modern German Zircon appears by 1780 in Axel von Cronstedts Versuch einer Mineralogie:

Dieser Stein ist gewönlich ponceau oder hiazinthenroth, welches sich zuweilen etwas ins gelbe, zuweilen mehr ins rothe, und oft auch ein wenig ins braune zieht. Selten fömt er von weisser Farbe (Zircon) vor.

(This stone is usually ponceau or hyacinth-red, which sometimes turns a little yellow, sometimes more red, and often also a little brown. Rarely it appears white in color (zircon).)

But it was Martin Klaproth, in 1789, who first identified zirconium as an element, which he dubbed Zirconerde:

Welche eine angemessenere Benennung veranlassen mögten, an ihr fennen lernen wird, den Namen Zirconerde, (Terra circonia) ben.

(Those who would like to use a more appropriate name will learn from it to use the name zircon-earth (Terra circonia).)

Zircon made its way into English in 1794 in Richard Kirwan’s Elements of Mineralogy in the form circon:

Jargonic Earth, or Jargonia.

This earth hath been discovered by Mr. Klaproth; it has as yet been found only in the stone called Jargon, or Circon, of Ceylon, of which more hereafter.

This earth resembles argill more than any other earth, though it differs essentially from it in some respects. Its colour is white, and its specific gravity probably exceeds 4,000.

(Jargon here is another variant of the mineral name and unrelated to the linguistic term.)

But it was Humphry Davy who, in 1808, dubbed the element zirconium:

From the general tenor of these results, and the comparison between the different series of experiments, there seems very great reason to conclude that alumine, zircone, glucine, and silex are, like the alkaline earths, metallic oxides, for on no other supposition is it easy to explain the phenomena that have been detailed.

The evidences of decomposition and composition, are not, however of the same strict nature as those that belong to the fixed alkalies and alkaline earths; for it is possible, that in the experiments in which the silex, alumine, and zircone appeared to separate during the oxidation of potassium and sodium, their bases might not actually have been in combination with them, but the earths themselves, in union with the metals of the alkalies, or in mere mechanical mixture.  And out of an immense number of experiments which I made of the kind last detailed, a very few only gave distinct indications of the production of any earthy matter; and in cases when earthy matter did appear, the quantity was such as rendered it impos­sible to decide on the species.

Had I been so fortunate as to have obtained more certain evidences on this subject, and to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and glucium.

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Sources:

Cronstedt, Axel Fredrik. Axel von Cronstedts Versuch einer Mineralogie, 1.1. Leipzig: 1780, 162. Google Books.

Davy, Humphry. “Electro-Chemical Researches, on the Decomposition of the Earths; with Observations on the Metals Obtained from the Alkaline Earths, and on the Amalgam Procured from Ammonia” (30 June 1808). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 98, 1808, 333–70 at 352–53. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1808.0023.

Kirwan, Richard. Elements of Mineralogy, second edition, vol. 1. London: J. Nichols for P. Elmsly, 1794, 14. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Klaproth, Martin H. “Chemische Untersuchung Des Zircons.” Der Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde Zu Berlin, 9. 1789, 147–176 at 171. Universität Bielefeld Universitätsbibliothek.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. jacinct(e, n., jagounce, n.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry. 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

Ovid. Metamorphoses, book 10. David Raeburn, trans. London: Penguin, 2004, 390–92.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2021, s.v. zirconium, n., zircon, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. jargon | jargoon, n.2, jacounce | jagounce, n., jacinth, n., hyacinth, n.

Image credits: zircon, Don Guennie, 2011, Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license; hyacinth, Alexander Kiselyov, late nineteenth century, National Museum in Warsaw, Wikimedia Commons, public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work

spaghettify / spaghettification

Homer Simpson being spaghettified by a black hole

1 May 2024

Astronomers are often rather creative with the names they come up with for the objects and processes they discover. An example is the verb to spaghettify and the noun spaghettification. The words describe what would happen to a person (or thing) who fell into a black hole. The gravity (tidal force) at the feet of the person would be orders of magnitude stronger than at the head, causing the person to be stretched like a piece of spaghetti.

The earliest use of the words, in this case the noun spaghettification, that I have found is in Nigel Calder’s 1977 book The Key to the Universe, which was published in association with a BBC television program of the same name. In the book, however, Calder implies that the term is already in use by astronomers studying black holes:

The fate of the imagined space-traveller who stumbled upon a black hole became a commonplace way of describing the extra-ordinary work of gravity, in and around a black hole. Before being trapped and crushed, the unwary astronaut would first be stretched into spaghetti.

The first hint of trouble might be his hair standing on end, his feet and hands feeling heavy, his head light. The astronaut’s blood would drain into his limbs, bringing merciful unconsciousness before gravity rendered his body into meat, into molecules, into atoms, and eventually into a long beam of particles hurtling toward the black hole.

Spaghettification was due to the gravity intensifying, metre by metre, in the approach to a black hole. It was a tidal effect, an extreme version of the process by which the Moon would pull more strongly on sea-water immediately beneath it than on the oceans to the far side of the Earth. In the more severe conditions around a black hole, the force of gravity increased so rapidly towards the centre that it could easily be a million times stronger at the spaceman’s feet than at his head. So he would be torn apart by the tide.

And the verb sees print by 1981, when it appears in Nigel Henbest’s The Mysterious Universe:

A simple nonspinning black hole would be no good for interuniverse travel. We have already seen the fate of the unfortunate explorer of such a hole, crushed inexorably by the one-way flow of space within, into the unseen central singularity. The entrance to the interuniverse tunnel must be rotating, or an electrically charged, black hole, large enough for the intrepid explorer not to be spaghettified.

Often scientific jargon (or is it slang in this case?) remains within the discourse of the scientists, but the public’s fascination with black holes and the rather gruesome imagery of the spaghettification process has caused the term to enter into mainstream discourse. Here is an example from, of all places, in a 2000 book review in the magazine Good Housekeeping:

It's a good bet that few guidebooks reveal where you can experience “spaghettifying.” But Around Chicago with Kids (Fodor’s, $10) does. (FYI: You can become long and skinny near a black hole in space…or in front of the wall of mirrors at the city’s Adler Planetarium.)

So that’s spaghettification, a rather grim and graphic description of an astronomical process.

There is, however, an older, non-astronomical use of the term. It appears in a 1965 English translation of Alfred Jarry’s 1897 play Ubu Cocu. Jarry’s (1873–1907) works were precursors to the twentieth-century genres of Dada, Surrealism and the Theater of the Absurd. The passage from Ubu Cocu refers to what will happen to man who cuckolds another:

There’s nothing to be done with him. We’ll have to make do with twisting the nose and nears [sic], with removal of the tongue and extraction of the teeth, laceration of the posterior, hacking to pieces of the spinal marrow and the partial or total spaghettification of the brain through the heels. He shall first be impaled, then beheaded, then finally drawn and quartered. After which the gentleman will be free, through our great clemency, to go and get himself hanged anywhere he chooses. No more harm will come to him, for I wish to treat him well.

The metaphor of spaghetti is original to the English translation. Jarry’s original French reads:

arrachement partiel ou total de la cervelle par les talons

(partial or total removal of the brain through the heels)

But this earlier appearance of spaghettification is probably unrelated to the astronomical usage. While it is possible that some astronomers had read Cyril Connolly’s translation of Jarry’s play or that Connolly was conversant with astronomers and astronomical jargon, both of these seem far less likely than the idea that the two uses are separate coinages.

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Sources:

Calder, Nigel. The Key to the Universe. New York: Viking, 1977, 143. Archive.org.

“Have Tots Will Travel.” Good Housekeeping, March 2000, 69/2. ProQuest Magazine.

Henbest, Nigel. The Mysterious Universe. London: Ebury, 1981, 145. Archive.org.

Jarry, Alfred. Ubu Cocu, 5.2 (1897). In Selected Works of Alfred Jarry. Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor, eds. Cyril Connolly, trans. New York: Grove, 1965, 50. Archive.org.

———. Ubu Cocu (1897) in Tout Ubu. Maurice Saillet, ed. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1962, 244. Archive.org.

Image credit: Moore, Steven Dean (director) and Matt Groening (creator). “Treehouse of Horror XXIII” (TV episode). The Simpsons, 24.2, 7 October 2012. Fair use of a single frame from the animation to illustrate the topic under discussion.

cat's pajamas / whiskers / meow

Advertisement for the 1926 film The Cat’s Pajamas

29 April 2024

The phrase the cat’s pajamas (also cat’s whiskers or cat’s meow), meaning something superlative or excellent, is indelibly associated with the 1920s and the jazz age. The phrase is often credited to cartoonist Thomas Aloysius “Tad” Dorgan, but while he did use the cat’s meow (and perhaps other variants), Dorgan was not the originator.

These three are only the most popular and long-lasting in a series of animal phrases constructed with the definite article the, such as the antelope’s tonsils, bullfrog’s beard, canary’s tusks, caterpillar’s camisole/kimono/spats, clam’s cuticle/garters, crocodile’s adenoids, duck’s quack, elephant’s tonsils, frog’s eyebrows, kipper’s knickers, kitten’s vest, lion’s bathrobe, oyster’s eyetooth,  pig’s scream/whiskers, sandfly garters, snake’s eyebrows, and sparrow’s chirp. Not to mention other items belong to cats, such as cuffs, knee-knuckles, lingerie, nightgown, tonsillitis, and vest. And of course, there is the bee’s knees. It's easy to see how the idea of such rare or impossible things could give rise to a phrase denoting something that is exceptional or especially noteworthy.

The earliest use of the cat’s pajamas that I have found is in the unit newspaper of the US Army’s 21st General Hospital in Denver, Colorado of 17 July 1919. The phrase appears in an announcement that the army baseball team will play the team from the local Armour meat company:

“Say Medina,” said he, “this ball team of mine needs a lotta practice; so I’d like to have ’em come out here to the Coop every Thursday evening and stage a game with the soldiers boys. When we come out, we’ll bring something for the boys every time—some Armour food product you know. We’ll also bring along a couplea [sic] stoves on which we can cook the stuff and serve the hot wienies, fried ham sandwiches and such delectable food. Whad’ye say?”

Well, what else could O’Brien’s Helper say but that he thought it would be the cat’s pajamas to have feed like that dished up to the fellows every Thursday.

A year later in his syndicated column of 5 July 1920, Damon Runyan “records” this fictional conversation between two delegates to a political convention:

Second Delegate (angrily)—I tell you I ain’t been nowhere! I’m out here for business, and all I want now is to get somebody nominated, such as McAdoo, and go back to Springfield. I’m sick of this delay. It’s daffy people like you who are holding us back by runnin’ around town, and not being at the convention on time.

First Delegate (astounded)—Well, now, that’s sure the cats pajamas! Of course, I don’t get to the convention much, but everybody knows I’m for Jimmy Cox and they vote me that way whether I'm there or not.

This is passage is also notable in that it’s an early use of Springfield as a non-specific anytown, ala The Simpsons. (Contrary to popular belief, a town called Springfield does not exist in every state but only in thirty-four of them. Riverside, appearing in forty-six states, takes the prize.)

The cat’s pajamas also generated a short-lived dance of that name. From Kentucky’s Lexington Herald of 13 July 1921:

A couple of street dancers recently were arrested in Brooklyn for doing such vulgar steps as the “Frisco Dip” and “Elevated Swing.” Other interesting performances by the pair were the “Lame Dog” and the “Cat’s Pajamas.” Oh, Terpsichore, what outrages are committed in thy name!

And it was only a matter of time before the phrase appeared in that sub-genre of newspaper articles, those that pack an absurd amount of slang into a few column inches. Georgia’s Columbus Enquirer-Sun of 16 March 1922 has this fictional conversation:

Father—“Tell us all about the big city my lad.”

Only Son—“It’s the cat’s pajamas, dad, if you only have the boffos. What’s boffos? Why the berries, the jack, the kale. Of course, if you are a dad they give you the air. Get me mother!”

Mother—“I cannot say that I do my son.”

Unlike cat’s pajamas and the other animal phrases of its ilk, the cat’s meow and the cat’s whiskers have a different etiology, although they appear at about the same time. Cat’s whiskers and meows are common, and the sense of something exceptional arises out of the idea that these are things a cat is proud of.

The earliest such figurative use of the cat’s meow that I’m aware of is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as coming from Pirate Piece of May 1921. Pirate Piece was the post-war unit newsletter of the 304th US Field Artillery Regiment, a “pirate piece” being a single gun detached from the unit to perform some mission or to go unnoticed by the enemy. I have been unable to find a copy, so I cannot verify the citation or provide it’s wider context:

A good letter, Quig, one like that every month would be the “cat's meow.”

The earliest use that I have verified is from a few months later, in an 11 September 1921 article in Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s State Times about movie stars and Hollywood power couple Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford:

Douglas looked like the cat’s meow, all dolled up in a nice gray flannel yachting suit and everything, and Mary, with a half-Nelson on his right forearm, in a blue silk suit lined with red silk and wearing shoes and stockings and a hat and white kid gloves and smiling like a May morning.

Early use of “the cat’s whiskers,” 1922

The cat’s whiskers makes its print debut, as far as I can tell, in a cartoon, Noozie, Sunshine Kid, appearing in Gulfport, Mississippi’s Daily Herald of 12 April 1922:

A belt is all right but a pair of suspenders is the cat’s whiskers

And three days later it appears in Omaha’s Sunday World-Herald of 15 April 1922 in an article about nine residents of the city:

Mr. Black was wearing a $10 derby at the time, and while in the midst of a sentence a gust of wind came along and blew it into the street. The brewer’s big horses coming down the road, stepped with great accuracy on the crown. Mr. Black cursed drink and all that goes with it and hen decided a $2 hat store would be the “cat’s whiskers” as it were. For sixteen years he covered the blocks of Omaha’s best citizens selling hats first from Sixteenth street near Dodge and then from the old Pease store near Fifteenth and Farnum.

There may, of course, be earlier instances of any of these yet to be found, especially of the cat’s meow or the cat’s whiskers, as literal uses of these phrases abound and it’s difficult to sift the wheat from the chaff.

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Sources:

Carroll, Ramond G. “Women Who Refuse to Bear the Names of the Men They Marry.” Columbus Enquirer-Sun (Georgia), 16 March 1922, 7/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Doug and Mary in Living Picture, ‘Guests of Boy Scouts,’ Make Hit” (11 September 1921). State Times (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), 27 September 1921, 7/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Estes. “Sports Chat.” Lexington Herald (Kentucky), 13 July 1921, 6/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. cat’s pyjamas, n., cat’s meow, n., cat’s whiskers, n.

Griswold, Gerard Coburn. “What Nine Omahans Were Doing at 25.” Sunday World-Herald (Omaha, Nebraska), 15 April 1922, Magazine 3 and 11 at 11/2–3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Noozie, Sunshine Kind (cartoon). Daily Herald (Gulfport, Mississippi), 12 April 1922, 1/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cat, n.1.

Runyan, Damon. “Two Delegates Talk.” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), 5 July 1920, 4/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Wieners, Fried Bacon, Salisbury Steaks for Loyal Rooters.” ’Tenshun, 21! (US Army General Hospital 21, Denver, Colorado), 17 July 1919, 1/6. ProQuest Magazines.

Image credits: The Cat’s Pajamas (advertisement), Paramount Pictures, 1926. Public domain image; Noozie, Sunshine Kid, unknown artist, 1922. Public domain image.