Idiomatic Expressions

The last entry is aguentar o temporal, and the Portuguese verb in it is the plain one: aguentar is to bear, to hold out, and it would serve just as well for a heavy box or a long queue. English reaches instead for a noun and makes the noun do the work. « Weather » names a thing, not an action, and yet « to weather » is a perfectly ordinary verb, and what it means is to come through something and be marked by it. A crew weathers a gale; a face is weathered by thirty winters outdoors; rock is worn away by weathering. Out of that comes the fixed phrase for a firm or a family that survives a bad stretch, « to weather the storm ». Notice what the English verb carries that aguentar does not. It says nothing about effort and everything about exposure: what is weathered does not push back, it stands in the open and is still standing afterwards, changed. So the shop in this sentence did not merely hold on; it took the whole winter in the face.