It was one of the expressions used by flappers in America during the Roaring 20s to mean something good. "This drink is the bee's knees." It appeared in print several years earlier, too, in newspaper cartoons.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, the phrase was first used to denote something small and insignificant, but transferred to the opposite sense in US slang. It means 'an outstandingly good person or thing'.
It basically means putting on an elaborate show of what you are doing just for the show of it. We use the term at work sometimes when a supervisor comes around to watch us work. We put on a 'dog and pony show' when we do things the way they want us to do them, even if it's less efficient and not really necessary, just because it's the way they want to see us do it.
I believe the saying used a dog originally "The earliest version appears as far back as 1678, in the second edition of John Ray’s collection of English proverbs, in which he gives it as “there are more ways to kill a dog than hanging”
Probably catgut manufacturers. I'd assume there's a whole economies of scale thing with cat skinning to get enough guts to make tennis rackets and violin bows. A catgutter who picked the wrong skinning method could well go out of business.
Cat gut was not made out of Cat's guts, usually the intestines of sheep or goat, depending on usage (rackets or violin strings, archery bow strings etc and sometimes used in sutures for cuts.)
I know I'm late to this game, but the "cat" in this phrase is actually a catfish. Catfish have skin, not scales, and there really are multiple ways you can skin and fillet them. So the phrase isn't nearly as horrifying as it seems. Malbaby is right that catgut has never been made from cats, but used to be made mostly from sheep's intestines and is now usually nylon.
I see a bunch of comments of people saying they have never heard of Jive Turkey, but have heard of Jive Bunny. For me, it's the opposite. I had never heard of Jive Bunny in my life before reading these comments.
Many African Americans used the expression "Jive Turkey" in the 1970's in reference to smooth-talking men who tried to trick people. I heard it hundreds of times in Manhattan back in those days; I think by the early 1980's, it began to sound as ridiculous as "bee's knees" sounds to us today.
Jive Turkey I've heard used as an insult every now and then
Oh, my logic under mild pressure...