Emergencies and safety

Eighteenth in the list is o carteirista, and the two languages name the same thief from opposite ends of the crime. Portuguese names him after the thing taken: a carteira is the wallet, and the suffix -ista turns it into the person who makes a trade of it, exactly as it does in o taxista or o dentista. English names him after the act instead, and « pickpocket » belongs to a small and very old class of compounds built as a verb plus its object. Before it came « cutpurse », older by some two hundred years, and the change of word records a change of clothing. A purse in the fourteenth century hung from a belt in plain view and was cut away; once garments had inner pockets, cutting gave way to picking and the criminal was renamed. The same pattern gave « scarecrow », « killjoy », « spoilsport » and « turncoat », and English stopped coining it long ago, which is why the survivors all sound faintly archaic. The modern suffix would produce « pocket-picker », and nobody says that.