At the supermarket

The twenty-ninth entry is fazer provisões, and English has nothing built the same way. The noun inside it looks like « provisions », and « provisions » does exist, but it belongs to expeditions and ships’ stores rather than to a Thursday at the supermarket. What English reaches for instead is a phrasal verb, « to stock up », and it arrives with a rule. « Stock up » is intransitive: nothing may follow it directly, and whatever was bought has to be introduced by « on » — « we stocked up on flour », never « we stocked up flour ». Leave the « on » out and the sentence simply stops working. The bare verb « to stock » is a different word altogether and belongs to the shop rather than to the shopper: « we do not stock that brand » says what the shelves carry, so a customer who announces that he stocked the cupboard has quietly put himself behind the counter. Portuguese needs none of this, because fazer provisões already has its object inside it, and the verb fazer is doing no work beyond holding the phrase together.