Weather and seasons

Third on the list is a chuva, and the word itself gives no trouble at all. What is worth noticing is how much work rain does in English once it has left the sky. « Right as rain » is a remark about health and has nothing to do with the weather. « It never rains but it pours » is about misfortunes turning up in a heap. « Saving for a rainy day » is about money, and the day in question may well be sunny. « To rain on somebody’s parade » is to spoil their pleasure, and « raining cats and dogs » is the only one of the set still describing actual water. Portuguese keeps chuva much nearer the window. Its best-known phrase is chove a cântaros — it is raining by the pitcherful, a jug where we reach for animals — and chover, the verb further down the same list, stays literal nearly everywhere it goes. So the traffic runs one way. An English sentence with rain in it may be about health, money or bad luck, and wants reading twice before it is translated; a Portuguese one is usually about getting wet.