Entry · catalog no. 6178
young suit
/ /jʌŋ ˈsuːt/ /yung SOOT
noun · Harlem, New York · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
A suit too tight and too short on the man wearing it — sleeves riding up the wrist, trouser cuffs stopping high — as though it had been made for a boy and never let out. In a Harlem where a man's tailoring was read as a report on his fortunes, a young suit told on you.
“He was talking big about the money he was making, but that young suit told on him.”
Origin & Attribution
Harlem, 1930s and 1940s, recorded by Zora Neale Hurston in 1942. It draws on an older and wider slang sense of young meaning undersized or a miniature version of a thing, and Harlem speakers turned it on clothing. The phrase sits inside a whole Harlem vocabulary of dress — draped down, righteous rags, butt sprung, the zoot suit with the reet pleat — that graded a man by his cut and drape. It was a folk term of judgment, never a trade or fashion-industry word.
1942
Hurston records "young suit: ill-fitting, too small" in her Glossary of Harlem Slang
1995
Reprinted in Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories, Library of America, glossary at p. 1010
1999
Connie Eble's Campus Slang records young meaning too tight, showing the underlying sense still alive
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Harlem, New York · 1940s
Spoken by
Harlem men in street and sporting life; Southern migrants working the avenues
$YOUNGSThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Dormant84 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
1942
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
■
Zora Neale Hurston, "Glossary of Harlem Slang," The American Mercury, July 1942
magazine
■
Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories, Library of America, 1995, p. 1010
book
■
+ Cite a sourceConnie Eble, Campus Slang, November 1999
slang glossary
See also