Entry · catalog no. 1667
too much
/ /ˌtu ˈmʌtʃ/ /too MUTCH
phrase · New York (Brooklyn and Harlem) · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
Said of a person, a performance, or a thing that has run past the ordinary measure of praise, so that the speaker admits there is nothing left to compare it to. It is admiration by overflow rather than by degree, and it carries a note of delighted surrender: the listener has been beaten by how good the thing was.
“That last chorus of hers — Jack, she is too much.”
Origin & Attribution
Black entertainers, dancers, and the newspapermen who covered them in New York, from at least 1936. A young Alfred A. Duckett used it as praise in his "Truckin' 'Round Brooklyn" column in the New York Age two years before Cab Calloway's first hepster dictionary, and it traveled with the swing and bebop circuits through the 1940s. It is routinely filed as 1950s Beat slang. That is backwards: the Beats took it from Black musicians who had been saying it for a generation.
1936
Used as praise in Alfred A. Duckett's column in the New York Age, 6 June
1944
Calloway prints it as the term of highest praise in The New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary
1946
Mezz Mezzrow uses it plainly of a band in Really the Blues
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
New York (Brooklyn and Harlem) · 1930s
Spoken by
Black musicians, dancers, and nightlife columnists; later the wider jazz and bebop world
$TOOMUCThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady90 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
90/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1936
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.
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Citations & Sources
■
Alfred A. Duckett, "Truckin' 'Round Brooklyn," New York Age, 6 June 1936, p. 6
newspaper column
■
Cab Calloway, The New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary: Language of Jive, 6th ed., 1944
dictionary booklet
■
+ Cite a sourceMezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues, Random House, 1946, p. 114
memoir
See also