Entry · catalog no. 8476
deuce of haircuts
/ /ˌduːs əv ˈhɛərˌkʌts/ /DOOSS uhv HAIR-kuts
phrase · Harlem, New York · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
A stretch of two weeks. The unit is the haircut — a man's standing weekly trip to the barber — so one haircut is one week and a deuce of them is two. Part of a whole jive counting system that measured time by habit rather than by date, and that borrowed its numerals from cards and dice: deuce for two, tray for three.
“I'll be gone a deuce of haircuts, then I'll dig you back at the pad.”
Origin & Attribution
Harlem jive of the early-to-mid 1940s, out of the barbershop and the Black press. The building block is Dan Burley's: the Amsterdam News editor uses "a tray of haircuts" in running jive prose in his Original Handbook of Harlem Jive, which fixes haircut as one week, and he uses "deuce of benders" for two knees, showing the frame was already productive. The exact compound, glossed as two weeks, is confirmed in Lou Shelly's separate 1945 compilation. The archive records this openly: Burley supplies the unit and the pattern, Shelly supplies the full phrase.
1944
Burley prints "a tray of haircuts" in the Original Handbook of Harlem Jive, fixing haircut as one week
1945
"Deuce of haircuts, two weeks" appears verbatim in Shelly's Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary
2009
Thomas Aiello's edition Dan Burley's Jive returns the handbook to print
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Harlem, New York · 1940s
Spoken by
Harlem hep cats, musicians, and barbershop and poolroom regulars; carried in Dan Burley's Amsterdam News and Chicago Defender columns
$DEUCEOThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Dormant82 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
30/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1944
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Dan Burley, Dan Burley's Original Handbook of Harlem Jive, 1944, p. 12
book
■
Lou Shelly, ed., Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary, T.W.O. Charles Co., Derby, CT, 1945
book
■
+ Cite a sourceThomas Aiello, ed., Dan Burley's Jive, Northern Illinois University Press, 2009
scholarly edition
See also