Misappropriated or not?

What's up with 'pilch'?

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Beth Singer, of San Diego, writes: “Last night my husband and daughter and I were watching the first episode of the new season of Only Murders in the Building, the Steve Martin / Martin Short / Selena Gomez comedy. We were surprised when the three main characters used the word pilch to mean “to steal.” They also referred to the person who pilched as a pilcher. We had the captions on, and the words showed up there as pilch and pilcher on screen, so I don’t think I imagined it. They had to mean filch/filcher, right? I was especially surprised because Steve Martin is a writer and must care about words.

Beth, I saw that show too and heard those remarks and was puzzled. But now that you mention it …

Merriam-Webster’s online agrees with you that filch is a verb that means “to steal secretly or casually,” and it gives pilch only as a noun, with the meanings “an outer garment made originally of skin or fur and later of leather or wool, “obsolete : a saddle cover,” “a light child's saddle,” and “an infant's wrapper covering the diaper.” No wonder it doesn’t come up often in casual conversation!

Steve Martin does do some of the writing for Only Murders, but TV scripts don’t get formally fact-checked or copy edited, as I assume what Martin writes for The New Yorker does. A little further fact-checking on my part, however, discovered that the Oxford English Dictionary gives an older (since 1225) meaning for pilch as a verb. The entry notes that it’s “Now regional (chiefly U.S. regional and Scottish (northern))” and defines it as “intransitive and transitive. To pick, pluck; to pilfer, rob.” So let’s all feel free to pilch — or pilfer or pinch — this use of the word from the show.

Email me with your language questions, peeves, problems, etc., at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Correspondence may be edited. If you subscribe to The Boston Globe, I hope you’ll look for my column, “May I Have a Word,” in the Ideas section every other Sunday.