“It’s the cat’s pajamas”
“It’s the what?”, I asked. “Why are the cats wearing pyjamas?”
At first I thought my friend was crazy. Then I realised that I had been living in under a rock and was the only one who didn’t know this phrase. It turns out that ‘cat’s pyjamas’ is a 1920s phrase for ‘a wonderful or remarkable person or thing’, or in Wikipedia’s more restrained language, something ‘beneficial’.
Later that week, I was reading a book on the train and it talked about a product being the cat’s pyjamas. Immediately, this phrased jumped out at me – not just because I now knew what it meant, but also because I’d heard it recently and it was familiar to me.