I recently watched the charming 1989 “crime comedy” Breaking In (directed by Bill Forsyth and written by John Sayles — how could it be bad?), in which Burt Reynolds is an aging safecracker showing young Casey Siemaszko the ropes. The climactic robbery is of an old safe at an amusement park, and when they get to work Reynolds pulls on that big heavy cylindrical thing that you normally need a combination for and it pulls right out. He says “Hey, the hitch is open!” and they admire the piles of cash for a minute until they hear voices and hide; it turns out the park workers had just left it open for a minute while they went to get more sacks of cash. When they’ve put the cash in, of course they spin the combination lock, so now our heroes will have to use their explosives after all. Today I watched it with the commentary track (with Forsyth and Sayles), and Sayles said he’d done research into safes and safecracking and it turns out people fairly frequently don’t bother locking them, they just shove the hitch closed so that on Monday it will be easier to open up; in fact, experienced safecrackers routinely try just pulling it open, because some percentage of the time it works. All of which is interesting, but what’s this word hitch? There’s no such sense in the OED (entry updated just this year) or anywhere else I can find, and I have no idea whether it’s an established term that’s just too niche for dictionaries or whether it’s some bit of ephemeral slang that happened to be used in the late ’80s. Anybody know?
A variant of hatch?
Here’s the movie, free, on Youtube. Start at 1:08:30 for the relevant portion. First, Reynolds says, “Ok, what do we do first”, and his trainee assistant says “Check the hitch.” Then he finds he can open the safe door, it is un-hitched. They start taking out the sacks, hear the workers coming, and Reynolds says, “Put it back, put on the hitch.” A bit later, after loading more catch one worker says to the other, “Don’t leave it on the hitch this time, spin it all the way. We won’t be back tonight.”
I’ve worked with a few large old safes from the 1904 era Reynolds mentions. They had a combination dial, plus a handle with which you could close the door without locking it, unless you also spun the dial. I suspect the “hitch” in this case means that handle and whatever kind of hook or latch it engages to hold the door closed but not locked. My guess is it’s just a term that was used by the particular safecrackers that Sayles talked to, because I’m not finding usage examples in diagrams of safe mechanisms and the like.
Alternative thought: when you dialed the combination on those safes to the final number, you could always feel a distinct click or “hitch” in the way it spun when it reached the right spot and would open. So, the first thing a safecracker might try is to gently spin the dial in hopes that he can detect that spot on the dial, which would be the case if the last person who closed it left it dialed just a partial turn away from the last number, instead of spinning it around 2+ times as they should.
Thanks very much — I was hoping for just such a detailed and well-informed answer!
Crime as Work, by Peter Letkemann (1973), according to google books, snippets pp. 66-67?:
It is assumed that for reasons of convenience office personnel develop short-cut methods of opening and locking safes. It is unlikely the door will be left entirely unlocked, but to leave it “on the hitch” (day-locked, i.e., partially locked) during the day is not unusual.
the hitch . The safecracker who has arrived prepared to blow the safe will, nevertheless, first try the handle to see if it is on the hitch or unlocked . One experienced safecracker recalled his embarrassment when his novice look …
whereas trying the handle to see if the safe is on the hitch is standard procedure.
Great stuff, thanks!
Irrelevant plug for the superb film Rififi, on account of it having the best safe-cracking scene EVAH. Accept no substitutes.
A plug for the 1970s goofball heist movie The Hot Rock, for the intentionally worst Rififi-style heist scene ever, and for culminating with the most original heist scene ever.
leave it “on the hitch” (day-locked, i.e., partially locked) during the day is not unusual.
Sounds very close to ‘on the latch’. Wikti ‘latch’ Etymology 2, sense 1, with illustration. That is, constrained so the door won’t swing open in the wind, but can easily be opened without a key.
Now I’m wondering if that’s not a common U.S. expression?
[Another example of AI Overview enshittification. If I ask if that’s a specifically BrE expression, it agrees. If I ask if it’s a specifically AmE expression, it says used equally both sides of the Atlantic.]
The Century Dictionary has meanings not in the OED or M-W, including (in the supplement) the mining term ‘a hole or pocket made to receive the end of a timber’, from the verbal sense ‘to catch or dig into; […] (in mining) to dig or pick (pockets) to receive the end of timbers.’ Maybe that can be connected with the hole (the box) which a bolt goes into?
Also, it turns out that hitch is a name for Lavinia exilicauda, a freshwater fish of Central California, which I didn’t know. The name is Eastern Pomo, and originally applied to the Clear Lake splittail, Pogonichthys ciscoides, once the most abundant fish in the lake, but now extinct.
Perhaps also of interest in the same movie, the variant (?) “leave it on the hitcher,” which could suggest hitch is short for hitcher (a self-fastener?).
42:24
We’re thieves, remember? Now, the first thing we do… A hitch. What are you doing?
42:32
Huh! How’d you know how to do that? It happens a lot. They don’t want to run through the whole combination every time there’s a money drop.
42:38
So they don’t spin the dial when they close the door. They leave it on the hitcher. So we don’t have to haul it out of here, huh? Oh…not so lucky, kid.
>Wikti ‘latch’ Etymology 2, sense 1, with illustration. That is, constrained so the door won’t swing open in the wind, but can easily be opened without a key.
Verbal forms (hitching post, getting hitched) are utterly common in AmerEnglish for a meaning around secure or fasten. I think it’s just the noun that Hat is asking about, and what part exactly it refers to.
There is also the trailer hitch, which the ball on the back of the vehicle that a clasp goes around. As I think about it, that’s probably the most common noun meaning of hitch in AmerEnglish.
Perhaps also of interest in the same movie, the variant (?) “leave it on the hitcher,” which could suggest hitch is short for hitcher (a self-fastener?).
Ah, I’d forgotten that (or simply didn’t notice it) — that would make good sense of the noun.
There is also the trailer hitch, which the ball on the back of the vehicle that a clasp goes around. As I think about it, that’s probably the most common noun meaning of hitch in AmerEnglish.
Agreed.
When I was young, and did such things, hitch usually meant thumbing a ride.
Was the metaphor that the thumb was the hitch in hitchhiking, the hook that stopped a passing vehicle?
The OED says, “Originally denoting actions such as holding on to, or riding on, the back of a moving vehicle (cf. skitch v.); later typically with reference to lifts or rides inside a vehicle with the driver’s agreement.”
The “cf. skitch” makes me less confident in their etymology, not more. Hitch is a age-old term whose meaning lends itself to hitchhike, for instance, including via “hitch your wagon” and surely predates furtively skitching.
Does it help that the OED’s etymology for “skitch” is “Apparently a blend of either ski v. or skate v. and hitch v.”? Or does that make you less confident about their use of “cf.”?
“snib” is a word most dictionaries define as a regional synonym for “latch”, but I’m sure many in the UK and Ireland subscribe to this definition [with photo]…
…which is just another datapoint that about the elusiveness of vernacular jargon
Stan Carey and commenters have explored the words snib and sneck. (Kory Stamper: “I am familiar with this term [sneck] by way of the Appalachian dialect my dad grew up speaking! None of his kin are Scots and they weren’t from an area settled by Scots, so I have no good explanation for why they used ‘sneck.’ ”)
I love this exploration of the yeggman’s slang, or technical vocabulary at least. Very interesting.
Also, it turns out that hitch is a name for Lavinia exilicauda, a freshwater fish of Central California, which I didn’t know. The name is Eastern Pomo, and originally applied to the Clear Lake splittail, Pogonichthys ciscoides, once the most abundant fish in the lake, but now extinct.
Very nice! Another word (cf. Y’s comment here) in North American English dictionaries from the indigenous languages of California, besides abalone, chuckwalla, islay, toyon, and wocas (wokas, wocus, etc.). My unabridged Random House Dictionary has hitch ‘a minnow, Lavinia exilicauda, inhabiting streams in the area of San Francisco and the Sacramento River basin’, but gives the etymology as ‘Origin uncertain’. I wonder if the general editing staff simply did not pass the word on to Ives Goddard for review because the word looked so English to them. Sally McLendon (1977) Ethnographic and Historical Sketch of the Eastern Pomo and their neighbors, the Southeastern Pomo gives the forms híčʰ and hiẓ́čʰ on page 10. It seems as if the ‘Hopkirk and McLendon, MS in preparation’ frequently mentioned here had details about how the Eastern Pomo meaning was determined (work with Pomo community members?). I wonder if it ever got published?
I found the word transcribed as hɪ́č, without the aspiration, in Hammel’s unpublished vocabulary, here (image 269). He did hear aspirated /čʰ/ elsewhere, so maybe there was variation in the pronunciation?
McLendon’s papers were acquired by Berkeley just this summer.