The cat’s pajamas, denoting something excellent, arose in the 1920’s along with many similarly improbable phrases involving animals and their anatomy or possessions, including the gnat’s elbow, the eel’s ankles, and the elephant’s instep. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The Cat’s Pajamas”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, how are you?
Excellent, who is this?
Diane from Wisconsin.
Hi, Diane, where are you?
I am in Bonita Springs, Florida on vacation.
Whoa, hey, hello.
Nice.
A little better than a home this time of year, right?
Oh yeah, on the white sandy beaches, you can’t beat it.
Sweet.
Nice.
And so you’re thinking about language, I’ll give Grant and Martha a call.
So my aunt, Aunt Jane Bergettis, I have to put her whole name out there.
She has been after me for years and years and years to tell me where the phrase is, “You’re the cat’s pajamas,” and “cute as a bug’s ear” comes from.
I’ve called everywhere, Google.
I’ve gone to the oldest librarians in the world.
Nobody can help me find it.
So I’m hoping that you can articulate a little bit more for her.
Well, you know, there’s a lot to say about this.
There was this whole period in the 1920s where strange things started happening to American slang.
Strange things, yes.
And it became quite a fad.
There was this whole fad in the 1920s of saying that something was really excellent or the best of its kind by taking the name of an animal and adding some part of the anatomy, like the bee’s knees or the cat’s pajamas.
Well, pajamas is different.
The thing that doesn’t exist, though, for sure, right?
Like the sardine’s whiskers.
Sardine’s whiskers, the eel’s ankle.
Yeah, the elephant’s adenoids.
What else?
The leopard stripes and the tiger spots.
You’re the tiger spots.
You know, you didn’t hear that much.
But it was kind of this, it was almost like a slang game, you know, where people would one-up each other with more variations of this.
But I know Cat’s Meow seems to predate Cat’s Pajamas a little bit.
You know, you’re the Cat’s Meow, which is like pretty much the essence of a cat, I guess.
And then we have pajamas and bees’ knees.
Most of those fell away, and then we kept the bees’ knees in the cat’s pajamas.
We kind of ironically kept them, right?
We all know that they’re dated.
Yeah.
I love it, though.
I love it.
And it always brings a smile when you hear something like that, you know, that is not so—
That’s more untraditional, I guess, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you mentioned cute as a bug’s ear.
That’s, you know, a bug is small to begin with and an ear is even smaller.
So it’s, you know, kind of cute and tiny.
It reminds me again of the bee’s knees because the expression bee’s knee goes all the way back to at least the 1790s.
Something is as small as a bee’s knee.
And so I think in the same way, cute is a bug’s ear.
Something’s really, really small and really, really cute.
That is an older meaning of cute as well, which is small and intricately or ornately made, right?
Well, I don’t want to put her age on it, but I’m pretty sure we’re in the same era.
Okay.
And she’s going to so enjoy this.
You have no idea.
You have no idea.
It will just probably make her dear, finding out the information.
Oh, that’s delightful.
We’re really glad to help.
Thanks, Diane.
Thank you.
Love you, Aunt Jean.
Thank you.
We do too, Aunt Jean.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
It’s this youthful exuberance between the wars, basically, right?
That’s a great way to put it.
Fashion and language and even finance, as we found out later when the stock market crashed, right?
All of these things were going gangbusters.
And some of it kind of stuck around.
But it was a period of liberation for women as well where they could break out of some of the traditional roles.
Got the right to vote, finally.
Could smoke in public without being scorned.
Right.
Things like that.
Yeah, I think of flappers and doing the Charleston.
I mean, this was sort of the linguistic version of that, I guess.
