Meaning of Idiom ‘The Bee’s Knees’
Something that is the bee’s knees is excellent; of high quality; desirable; enjoyable; or extremely good.
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Examples Of Use
“That Essential English idioms channel is the bee’s knees.”
“This new place in town has the best döner sandwiches. It’s really the bee’s knees.”
Origin
The bee’s knees has a curious, and perhaps unexpected, origin. You have to wonder how a bee’s knees came to mean something very good. Do bees even have knees? And, what’s so great about them?
Well, the original meaning of this idiom made more sense. Bee’s knees simply referred to something small; something of a diminutive nature.
Then it later, somehow, changed to mean something of excellent quality; something great. There are some colorful theories as to how this meaning is derived that serve as an excellent lesson in false etymologies for idioms.
Consider animal idioms, in general. Many of them tend to draw on our common knowledge of the animal, whether biological or just stereotypical. For example, the idiom ‘snake in the grass’ is transparent and easy to understand. A snake hiding in the grass is something to be wary of, indeed. It may be poisonous.
So, the meaning of snake in the grass, a deceitful,treacherous and sneaky person, makes perfect sense.
And, many of us perceive bats as being blind, or we know they have very weak eyesight. So, the idiom blind as a bat needs little explanation.
Now look at another familiar bee idiom: busy as a bee:
We understand bees to be busy creatures, always working in the hive or buzzing around collecting nectar or pollen. We see them as industrious and on the move.
So, the idiom busy as a bee is about as transparent as an idiom can be. It’s quite compositional, meaning you can deduce the meaning from the words used.
The bee’s knees does not follow this pattern. Its meaning is not apparent from the words that are used.
You’d be forgiven in thinking the bee’s knees meant something impossible since bees do not have knees!
Even if we do imagine bees do have knees, maybe the bee’s knees means something very small as the knee of a bee would have to be extremely tiny. And, as above, this was the original meaning. Then, it changed to become something very good. How do we deal with this?
Well, some, expecting the idiom to follow the same pattern as those other familiar idioms, have relied on a colorful story. Only this time it involves uncommon knowledge about bees.
Bees collect pollen from flowers and they load it onto tiny patches of hair on their legs. These are called scopa (scopae plural). The hair holds onto the pollen so it can be flown back to the hive. Therefore, we can perhaps see these scopae as analogous to knees!
This pollen stored on the bee’s knees is flown back to the hive to make honey. And honey is something of the highest quality, perhaps precious and sought after.
However, pollen isn’t used to make honey, nectar is. Since pollen isn’t really used to make honey, the theory evolves. The pollen is incidentally transferred from flower to flower by the bees, helping the flowers to reproduce. This is why bees are so important to the environment. And, aren’t flowers precious? So, the bee’s knees refers to something precious or excellent; the best.
As you may be understand, we have twisted ourselves into a linguistic pretzel to try to make this idiom fit our expectations. It’s an etymological quagmire and, what’s more, it can never be proven or disproven. Furthermore, it relies on the idea that the pollen-collecting apparatus on a bee’s legs is commonly understood enough to give birth to an idiom. These theories are colloquially called folk etymologies.
Folk etymology is a technical linguistic term that means something very specific, but in layman’s terms we can think of it as something that’s made up by ‘the folk.’ This is why such a theory is called folk etymology. The theory is made to fit the circumstance; to make the idiom fit a mold. Idioms are stubborn. They do not always cooperate.
Now, try to come up with such a theory for a similar idiom: the cat’s pajamas! While colorful stories satisfy our need for sensible and interesting origins, it’s more likely that the bee’s knees changed its meaning because of the existence of idioms like ‘the cat’s pajamas.’
Here are some other similar idioms:
- the dog’s bollocks
- the spider’s ankles (Irish)
- the ant’s pants
- the fox’s socks
- the camel’s hump
Many of these idioms are contemporary to each other. They all came about and were used during a
similar time period. In other words, it is likely that the existence of these other animal idioms to mean something very good caused the bee’s knees to be used this way also and this change to the opposite meaning happened very quickly. People simply expected the idiom to mean something
excellent.
Bee’s knees to mean something small was used during the mid to late 1800s. It often to referred to someone’s height as being ‘no higher than a bee’s knees,’ similar to how people say down South, ‘knee-high to a grasshopper.’
By the early 1900s, its present meaning was already common.