the cat’s pyjamas

The popular story

Two stories circulate. The first, and the tidier, claims that an English tailor named E. B. Katz made fine silk pyjamas for royalty and the fashionable rich, so that the cat’s pyjamas were literally the last word in luxury. The second credits the American sports cartoonist Thomas Aloysius Dorgan, known as Tad, who peppered his comic strips of the 1910s and 1920s with lively slang and is often said to have coined this phrase along with several of its cousins.

Both stories are attractive, and both are used to give a single, satisfying point of origin to what is really a much messier and more collective invention. The tailor tale in particular has the tidy shape of an after-dinner anecdote: a named craftsman, a royal clientele and a pun waiting to be made. The Dorgan attribution is more respectable, since he really did trade in this kind of slang, but it too compresses a broad popular fashion into one convenient author.

What the record shows

The record shows a phrase bubbling up out of a whole fashion for cheerful nonsense. In the years around 1920 American slang went through a craze for extravagant superlatives built on incongruous images: the bee’s knees, the cat’s whiskers, the cat’s meow, the gnat’s elbow and many more, most of them deliberately silly. The cat’s pyjamas belongs squarely in that family, and its comedy depends on the mismatch between a cat and a garment it would never wear.

Researchers at Wordorigins.org trace the earliest instance they have found to the unit newspaper of a United States Army general hospital in Denver, dated 17 July 1919. An often-cited earlier appearance in a South Carolina newspaper, the Pageland Journal, is dated to February 1918. A clearly datable and widely read use comes in the syndicated column of the sportswriter Damon Runyon in July 1920, where a character exclaims:

Well, now, that’s sure the cats pajamas!

By 1922 the phrase was common enough for Merriam-Webster to record it, and within a year or two it had crossed the Atlantic: a British newspaper prints it, respelled as pyjamas, in 1923. The speed of that spread is itself a clue. This was not a single writer’s coinage carefully released to the world, but a piece of popular slang that many people were already saying.

The wider family makes the point plainer still. Alongside the cat’s pyjamas the same years produced the cat’s whiskers, the cat’s meow, the bee’s knees, the snake’s hips and a dozen more, many of them recorded within a season or two of one another. No single tailor or cartoonist could have minted all of these, and they share a clear formula: take a small creature, attach to it some trivial or unlikely part or garment, and use the result as the highest possible praise. The cat’s pyjamas is one throw of that dice, and it is the formula, not any one inventor, that the record actually documents.

The verdict

The verdict is unproven as to who coined it and why. The tailor story can be dismissed with some confidence: there is no evidence for a Mr Katz and his royal pyjamas, and such a private origin could never account for the parallel phrases like the bee’s knees that plainly belong with it. Tad Dorgan’s role is more plausible but still unproven; he certainly helped popularise this kind of slang, and used related expressions, but the printed record does not show him inventing the cat’s pyjamas, and instances predate his supposed coinage. What we can say for certain is when the phrase surfaced and the family it belongs to; what we cannot say is whose mouth it first left.

What we don’t know

We do not know the individual who first joined a cat to a pair of pyjamas, and given the nature of oral slang we probably never will. We cannot be sure whether the very first use was spoken in a barracks, a newsroom or a dance hall, and the 1918 and 1919 citations, while valuable, mark the earliest surviving prints rather than the true birth. It is also likely, though not provable, that the phrase drew on African American vernacular speech before it reached the newspapers, as several commentators suggest. These are honest gaps, and no confident single name can fill them.

How it changed

In the 1920s the phrase was the height of fashion, a badge of the flapper and the jazz set, and it carried a real charge of the modern and the daring. As that decade receded it aged into something gently comic and nostalgic. Today it is used with a knowing smile, often to evoke the period from which it came, and it has lost the edge of genuine slang cool that it once had. The spelling split along national lines, with Americans keeping pajamas and the British writing pyjamas, but the meaning has stayed remarkably stable: the very best.

Usage today

The cat’s pyjamas now works chiefly as a warm, old-fashioned compliment, praising a person, gadget or idea as excellent while winking at the phrase’s own datedness. It is affectionate rather than earnest, and it pairs naturally with a fond or teasing tone. Its survival, when so much slang of the 1920s has died, probably owes something to that very charm: the image is absurd, memorable and impossible to say without a small smile, which is exactly what its first users seem to have intended.

It also carries, unavoidably, a period costume. To reach for the cat’s pyjamas today is to summon a whole decade of jazz, flappers and speakeasies, and writers use it precisely for that flavour. That is a fair fate for a phrase whose origin we cannot pin down: unable to name its inventor, we can at least place it firmly in its moment, and enjoy it as a small, well-preserved piece of the century that produced it.