palladium

Calabrian vase (c.350 BCE) depicting Odysseus and Diomedes stealing the Palladium from Troy

17 May 2024

Palladium is actually two words, with distinct, albeit related, etymological paths and meanings. The older use of the word comes from Greek myth, the newer one is the name of element 46.

The original sense of palladium (often capitalized) was the name of a statue of the goddess Athena in the city of Troy. Supposedly, as long as the statue was within its walls, the city could never by conquered. But the Greek warriors Odysseus and Diomedes slipped into the city during the siege and stole the statue. Use of the name in English appears by the late fourteenth century, borrowed from the French and Latin palladium. The Latin comes from the Greek Παλλάδιον (Palladion), formed from Παλλαδ- (Pallad- from the epithet Παλλάς (Pallas) of the goddess Athena) + ‑ιον (-ion, diminutive suffix).

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385) has this:

But though the Grekes hem of Troie suetten,
And hir cite biseged al aboute,
Hire olde usage nolde they nat letten,
As for to honoure hir goddes ful devoute;
But aldirmost in honour, out of doubte,
They hadde a relik, heet Palladion,
That was hire trist aboven everichon.

(But though the Greeks shut in those of Troy,
And besieged their city all about,
They did not wish to leave off their old customs
As to very devoutly honoring their gods;
But in utmost honor, out of reverence,
They had a relic, called Palladium,
That was their trusted object above everything.)

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, palladium had been generalized to refer to some venerated object that served as a safeguard or protector. We see this general sense in Philemon Holland’s introduction to his 1600 translation of Livy’s history:

Now in these 35 bookes, so few as they be, preserved as another Palladium out of a generall skarefire, we may conceive the rare and wonderfull eloquence of our writer in the whole.

The name of the element is much more recent, dating to 1803. Palladium is a silvery metal with atomic number 46 and the symbol Pd. The metal has many uses, with over half the world’s supply used in automobile catalytic converters. But it is also used in electronics, medicine and dentistry, hydrogen fuel cells, and in jewelry.

The element’s name was formed in English from Pallad- (Παλλαδ-) + -ium. But in this case the name is not taken directly from the epithet for Athena, but rather from the newly discovered asteroid Pallas, which in turn is named for the goddess (cf. cerium and asteroid / Ceres / Pallas / Juno / Vesta).

The metal was discovered and named by William Hyde Wollaston in 1802, but the chemist, wishing to make a profit from his discovery and to keep the process for refining it secret, did not publish in the usual journals. Instead he anonymously offered samples of the metal for sale. The name palladium first appears in a leaflet advertising the sale. The text of the leaflet is reproduced in a paper on the metal by Richard Chenevix appearing in the 1803 volume of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London:

Palladium, or new silver, has those properties amongst others that shew it to be a new noble metal.

1. It dissolves in pure spirit of nitre, and makes a dark-red solution. 2. Green vitriol throws it down in the state of a regulus from this solution, as it always does gold from aqua regia. […] 8. But, if you touch it, while hot, with a small bit of sulphur, it runs as easily as zinc.

It is sold only by MR. FORSTER, at No. 26, Gerrard-street, Soho, London; in samples of five shillings, half a guinea, and one guinea each.

In 1805, Wollaston finally wrote about his discovery in Philosophical Transactions, revealing himself as the discoverer and the reason for the name:

I shall on the present occasion confine myself principally to those processes by which I originally detected, and subsequently obtained another metal, to which I gave the name of Palladium, from the planet that had been discovered nearly at the same time by Dr. Olbers.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde. Stephen A. Barney, ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006, lines 1.148–54, 17.

Chenevix, Richard. “Enquiries Concerning the Nature of a Metallic Substance Lately Sold in London, as a New Metal, Under the Title of Palladium” (12 May 1803). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 93 (1803), 290–320 at 290. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1803.0012.

Holland, Philemon. “To the Reader.” In Livy. The Romane Historie. Philemon Holland, trans. London: Adam Islip, 1600, n. p. Early English Books Online.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. Palladioun, n.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2005, s.v. palladium, n.1, palladium, n.2.

Wollaston, William Hyde. “On the Discovery of Palladium; with Observations on Other Substances Found with Plantina,” (4 July 1805). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 95 (1805), 316–330 at 316. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1805.0024.

Photo credit: Bibi Saint-Pol, 2007. Louvre Museum, Paris. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

dollars to doughnuts

Image generated by the DALL-E AI image generator using the prompt “generate an image of betting dollars to doughnuts in the style of a medieval manuscript illumination; include both money and doughnuts in the image”

15 May 2024

The phrase (I’ll bet) dollars to doughnuts is an Americanism dating to the late nineteenth century, referring to the stakes of an imagined wager on a sure thing. While due to inflation, today one would be hard pressed to find a doughnut for less than a dollar, when the phrase was coined one could buy a number of the pastries for that price.

The earliest appearance of the phrase, in the singular a dollar to a doughnut, that I’m aware of is in Kansas’s Leavenworth Daily Commercial of 11 March 1871:

The tresses of a young lady of Illinois are said to be “of that peculiar hue that a field of ripe wheat throws toward a setting sun." It dis-tresses us to think that these newspaper men will write so hifalutin, when they might use “plain language,” like “Truthful James.” The girl has “yaller” hair, that’s what’s the matter with her. All this talk about peculiar wheat throwing out a ripe sun toward a setting field, is bosh and nonsense. It is a dollar to a doughnut that her carroty hair stands out, like quills on a fretful porcupine, except when she soaps it.

I was quite taken with this item. Not only is clever commentary on language that substitutes one metaphor for another in a different dialectal register, but it’s an example of a short item used to fill out the bottom of a column of unrelated text. In this case, it appears at the bottom of a column of business notices. It is also an example of a newspaper editor sniping at the practices of other papers, a common occurrence in nineteenth-century papers. The editor is commenting on a piece that first appeared in Scranton, Pennsylvania’s Morning Republican of 11 February 1871 and was reprinted in a number of other papers:

The most beautiful girl in the United States lives near Lincoln, Ill. Her hair is of that peculiar hue that field of ripe wheat throws toward the setting sun. Her eyes send forth a light so effulgent and magnetic that strangers become spellbound under its influence and stand rudely gazing. Her cheeks bear a bloom like the sunny side of an early peach. A pearl would seem almost black beside her teeth. Her form is so graceful that men worship her before seeing her face. Her hand suggest [sic] the idea of waxen fingers tipped with vermilion. Her smile seems actually to illuminate her presence, and when see [sic] laughs the listener fancies he hears sweet music in the distance.

The editor of the Leavenworth paper was quite right to object to this overly flowery, purple prose. (And fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will get a kick out of the use of effulgent.)

But back to the phrase at hand. The plural form, dollars to doughnuts, appears a few months later in Portland, Maine’s Portland Daily Press of 18 October 1871:

We will bet Dollars to Doughnuts that we are offering goods at lower prices than any house in Portland.

But doughnuts were not the only things of little value being wagered. There is the slightly earlier phrase dollars to buttons. Here is one in a letter dated 19 October 1870 printed in New York’s Pomeroy’s Democrat newspaper:

Some years ago, when we began life, dating back to the days of our infancy, the family physician said it would be dollars to buttons that we never lived to articulate the first letter of the alphabet. But we did.

The America’s Historical Newspapers database has five instances of dollars to buttons in 1870–71, all from Pomeroy’s Democrat. This version did not have the legs that dollars to doughnuts had, probably because it lacks the alliteration.

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Sources:

“Alas Poor Yorick!” (letter, 19 October 1870). Pomeroy’s Democrat (New York City), 9 November 1870, 5/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. dollar, n.1. (Green’s includes an 1803 citation for dollars to doughnuts, but this is an error. The “1803” is the page number, not the date, in a three-volume collection of Jack London’s works. London used the phrase three times in his 1911 short story The Meat.)

“Items.” Morning Republican (Scranton, Pennsylvania), 11 February 1871, 4/8. Newspapers.com.

Leavenworth Daily Commercial (Kansas), 11 March 1871, 4/2. Newspapers.com.

“Miscellaneous Notices” (advertisement). Portland Daily Press (Maine), 18 October 1871, 3/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. dollar, n.

Image credit: David Wilton, 2024 using the DALL-E image generator in the ChatGPT-4 AI. Public domain image.

memestock

A GameStop retail storefront in Manchester, Connecticut

13 May 2024

A meme stock is a publicly traded stock that experiences a sudden rise in value due to a concerted effort by a number of retail investors who organize over social media. The price of a meme stock usually has no relation to actual value of the company in question; they tend to be highly volatile and are often a bubble. The classic example of a meme stock is the brick-and-mortar video game retailer GameStop, whose stock rose some 600 percent in January 2021 due to the efforts of a group of investors organizing on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets.

The term is, of course, a compound of meme + stock.

The earliest examples I have found are on Twitter. This one, in the form of a hashtag, is from 2 May 2017:

$AMD inching towards that $10 mark as the #memestock is down another 2.4% AH after already -24% during the day.

And this one from 13 September 2018:

Every time i look at $AMD i cry a little bit because i was in at $8. And also because it was a memestock that actually blew up after i got out.

Meme stocks are not necessarily shares in companies with little or no value. AMD is an example of a meme stock whose underlying company had sound financial fundamentals, but its value was driven to excessive heights by small investors.

Mainstream journalism began using the term in early 2021 in response to the GameStop phenomenon. The earliest professional use of meme stock that I know of is by Techcrunch.com on 16 January 2021, about a week before the GameStock surge began:

Band 3 is the retail cohort, the /r/WallStreetBets, meme-stock, fintech Twitter rabble that are both incredibly fun to watch and also the sort of person you wouldn’t loan $500 to while in Las Vegas. They are willing to pay nearly infinite money for certain stocks—like Tesla—and often far more than the more conservative public money. Demand from the retail squad can greatly amplify the value of a newly listed company by making the supply/demand curve utterly wonky.

And there is this use in the National Review on 31 January 2021 in the midst of the GameStop bubble:

Robinhood and other brokerages halted trading not due to some shady desire to help Wall Street, but because they could not afford to shoulder the risks their customers were taking. A sizable portion of retail traders’ speculative investments in “meme stocks” were made with money borrowed from brokerages on margin. In response to increased volatility, Robinhood twice issued “margin calls,” decreasing the amount of borrowed money customers were allowed to invest in GameStop—first to 20 percent, then to zero.

There are a couple of older senses of meme stock. The first is one’s collection of internet memes that are ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. The second is a jocular usage that operates on the premise that internet memes can be traded like stocks.

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Sources:

Alex @mintauntaun, Twitter.com, 13 September 2018.

“The GameStop Bubble.” National Review, 31 January 2021.

Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, 16 April 2024, s.v. memestock, n.

North Bluff Capital @bluff_capital, Twitter.com, 2 May 2017.

Wilhelm, Alex. “No One Knows What Anything Is Worth.” Techcrunch.com, 16 January 2021.

Photo credit: Mike Mozart, 2014. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

oxygen

Liquid oxygen in a beaker

10 May 2024

Oxygen is a chemical element with atomic number eight and the symbol O. It is a highly reactive nonmetal that is a gas at room temperature. It’s the most abundant element in the earth’s crust and the third most abundant element in the universe, after hydrogen and helium. It constitutes about 21% of earth’s atmosphere. Oxygen is necessary for most life as we know it.

The name oxygen is borrowed from French, which formed the word from the Greek ὀξυ- (oxy-, referring to acid) + ‑γενής (-genis, meaning to create) in the eighteenth century.

The element was discovered independently by Carl-Wilhelm Scheele in 1771 and Joseph Priestley in 1774. Priestley called his discovery dephlogisticated air because oxygen is necessary for combustion. Phlogiston was a hypothetical substance that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, was believed to present in all combustible material and was released when burned. According to this theory, oxygen deprived materials of phlogiston, hence Priestley’s name for it. Antoine Lavoisier, in 1778, was the first to use the name oxigine, and that name stuck in both French and English:

D’après ces vérités, que je regarde déjà comme très-solidement établies, je désignerai dorénavant l'air déphlogistiqué ou air éminemment respirable dans l’état de combinaison & de fixité, par le nom de principe acidisiant, ou, si l’on aime mieux la même signification sous un mot grec par celui de principe oxygine: cette dénomination sauvera les périphrases, mettra plus de rigueur dans ma manière de m’exprimer, & évitera les équivoques dans lesquelles on seroit exposé à tomber sans cesse, si je me servois du mot d’air: ce nom en effet, d’après les découvertes modernes, est devenu un mot générique, & qui s’applique d’ailleurs à des subftances dans état d'éslasticité, tandis qu’il est ici question de les considérer dans l’état de combinaison, & sous la forme liquide ou concrète.

(According to these truths, which I already consider to be very solidly established, I will henceforth designate dephlogisticated air or eminently breathable air in the state of combination & fixity, by the name of acidizing principle, or, if we prefer the same meaning under a Greek word by that of the oxygen principle: this name will save the paraphrases, will put more rigor in my way of expressing myself, and will avoid the equivocations into which we would be exposed to constantly falling, if I used the word air: this name in fact, according to modern discoveries, has become a generic word, and which moreover applies to substances in a state of elasticity, while here we are talking about considering them in the state of combination, & in liquid or concrete form.)

(Lavoisier used the term principe or principle rather than élément.)

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Sources:

Lavoisier, Antoine. “Considérations génerales sur la nature des acides.” Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences avec les mémoires de mathématique et de physique. Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1778, 535–47 at 536. Biodiversity Heritage Library.

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.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2005, s.v. oxygen, n.

Photo credit: Nika Glover, 2010, US Air Force photo. Public domain image.

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.

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

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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.