Mern Þonke

The Daily Telegraph is running a series of extracts from Michael Quionion's Port Out, Starboard Home, which tells the stories of common folk etymologies. Follow the link to read the full text or have a look at a small clip below:

Bee's knees

Something that is the "bee's knees" is stylish and the height of excellence. It is sometimes explained as being from an Italian-American way of saying "business". I've also heard it argued that it is properly "Bs and Es", an abbreviation for "be-alls and end-alls".

Both are wrong. "Bee's knees" is actually one of a set of nonsense catchphrases from 1920s America, the period of the flappers. You might at that time have heard such curious concoctions as "cat's miaow", "elephant's adenoids", "tiger's spots", "bullfrog's beard", "elephant's instep", "caterpillar's kimono", "turtle's neck", "duck's quack", "gnat's elbows", "monkey's eyebrows", "oyster's earrings", "snake's hips", "kipper's knickers", "elephant's manicure", "clam's garter", "eel's ankle", "leopard's stripes", "tadpole's teddies", "sardine's whiskers", "pig's wings", "bullfrog's beard", "canary's tusks", "cuckoo's chin" and "butterfly's book".

None of these made much sense – but then, slang fashions often don't – and their only common feature was the comparison of something of excellent quality to a part of an animal with, if possible, a bit of alliteration thrown in. Another example was "cat's whiskers", which is sometimes said to have been the first of the bunch to arise, from the cat's whisker that was the adjustable wire in early radio crystal sets.

However, "cat's miaow" and "cat's pyjamas" (an exception to the anatomical rule, referring to the then new fashion of wearing pyjamas at night) are both recorded slightly earlier, in about 1921. The first appearance of "bee's knees" in print was found by Barry Popik in a flapper's dictionary in the Appleton Post-Crescent of Appleton, Missouri of April 28, 1922, glossed as meaning "peachy, very nice". Clearly, by then it must already have been well established.

It was a short-lived, frivolous slang fashion and only a very few such expressions have survived, of which "bee's knees" is perhaps the best known. A British example from the same period is "dog's bollocks". This, too, indicates something excellent, admirable or first-rate. Eric Partridge suggests it arose as a term for the printer's mark of a colon followed by a dash. This fits the pattern and period of the others, but its first sense suggests it came out of a different tradition. Certainly, it only became a general slang term much later.

Curry favour

It's an odd phrase. Why should "curry" have anything to do with winning the favour of somebody or ingratiating oneself with him?

It becomes even weirder when you discover that the phrase really means "to stroke a fawn-coloured horse".

Its origin lies in a French medieval poem called the Roman de Fauvel, written by Gervais de Bus in the early 1300s. Fauvel was a horse, a conniving stallion, and the poem is a satire on the corruption of social life. There are several layers of meaning in his name: fauve is French for a colour that is variously translated as chestnut, reddish-yellow or fawn. A close English equivalent is the rather rare "fallow", as in "fallow deer", an animal that has a brownish coat.

In addition, fauve can be the collective name for a class of wild animals whose coats are at least partly brown, such as lions and tigers (the fauverie in a French zoo is the section devoted to the big cats). In the poem, the name Fauvel is also an anagram of the initial letters of the French names of six sins: flattery, avarice, depravity, fickleness, envy and cowardice. And his colour evokes the old medieval proverbial belief that a fallow horse was the symbol of dishonesty.

The poem was well known among educated people in Britain, who started to refer to "Fauvel", variously spelled, as the symbol of cunning and depravity. That quickly became "curry Favel". "Curry" here has nothing to do with Indian food (that word arrived in the language from Tamil via Portuguese much later, at the end of the 16th century) but is the term for rubbing down a horse. The idea behind "currying Favel" is that the horse in the poem was susceptible to flattery, figuratively a kind of stroking.

Among people who didn't know the poem – then, as now, that was nearly everybody – "Fauvel" or "Favel" meant nothing at all. "Favour" seemed a much more sensible word; by the early part of the 16th century popular etymology had changed it to that and so it has remained ever since.