A friend of mine says he uses the word “kifed,” meaning to steal something. Recently he was out to dinner with his mother-in-law and used that word and she replied “Isn’t that kind of offensive?” She wouldn’t elaborate on why she thought that.
I searched the internet and found the word used in the context of stealing something on several personal web pages, but cannot find a dictionary definition or explanation of origin for it. I also looked in slang and swearing dictionaries, but still could find nothing.
The word rhymes with an offensive racial term, but I didn’t think that was a problem, except in Washington, D.C. (the “niggardly” incident.)
This probably doesn’t help much as to how it relates to stealing, but the word kif is an OLD word for marijuana.
In Paul Bowles book A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard (I think it was written in the 1920’s) On the opening pages, there is a quote that is something to the effect of “A pipe of kif before breakfast gives a man the strength of a hundred camels in the courtyard” and IIRC it is listed as an old Indian Proverb? I think it was Indian, anyway.
IANAE, but it may be related to the word cop, to grab or steal (now used mostly in the phrase to cop a plea). In my youth, the form of this was kipe, which only meant steal. Perhaps the evolution was cop->kipe->kife.
Stephen King used it in “The Running Man” writing as Richard Bachman. Obviously then its not new then, since that was written in the late 70’s, early 80’s. As for where it came from, I dunno.
This dictionary uses two different types of “impact symbols” around the entries to indicate words that are taboo (very strongly to be avoided) or vulgar (to be avoided except when a certain effect is desired). Kife is neither taboo nor vulgar. Kike, of course, is taboo. I suspect the mother-in-law just confused the two words.
The derivation of “kipe” is, as so often the case with slang terms, uncertain, but it may well have arisen as a modification of the now-obsolete English verb “to kip,” meaning to take hold of or to snatch." This “kip,” which first appeared in English around 1250, was based on the Old Norse verb “kippa,” meaning “to snatch, tug or pull.”
