Grammar Moses: I'm hot under the collar, and it's all about mercury

Please forgive my curmudgeonliness today. I have an air conditioner that's groaning like an old dog, and I have a full head of steam.

I'm suffering from a bout of SAD - syntactic annoyance disorder.

I get annoyed right around Halloween when reasonably intelligent people start talking gleefully about "the white stuff," as if it were cocaine instead of an awful synonym for snow. Please call it snow.

In the summer, I get hot and bothered when people talk about the mercury's getting as hot as 100 degrees. It's not the heat of the mercury you need to worry about - it's the air temperature that will turn you medium-rare in 15 minutes.

Mercury expands in its glass tube as the air around it gets warmer. It provides a reliable measure of temperature. So, can you say the mercury is rising? Of course. That's exactly what it does.

But it's rather silly to talk about mercury getting hotter. The mercury is only as warm as the air around it. A bowl of mercury that warms up is just a warm bowl of mercury. It's just an ingredient in an apparatus that measures air temperature.

It's another cutesy thing that is employed in the news industry to avoid repetition.

I've railed before about referring to the last Thursday in November as "the Thanksgiving Day holiday."

Too many words! "Thanksgiving" will do just fine.

But then I heard someone last week refer to the holiday just passed as "the Fourth of July holiday." Come on. Unless you're in another country where the Fourth of July was just another Wednesday, you're adding to your carbon footprint by expelling "the" and "holiday" from your lungs.

I feel so much better now. Pass the Freon.

Make do

A reader who wishes to remain anonymous asked me whether the idiom is to "make due" or "make do."

That's a very good question, because people get it wrong so often. At least they used to.

It's alarming how often the idiom has been misused in books. According to Google's Ngram Viewer, it was only at the end of World War II that "make do" finally surpassed "make due" as the dominant phrase in literature. These days, "make do" is about 12 times more popular than (that's 13 times as popular as) "make due."

Uh oh, Moses is going to get pedantic again, you might be thinking. If enough people write this way, it must be legit, right?

I say no.

To "make do" is to do something well enough with what's at hand. For instance, I could really use a miter saw, a pair of pipe clamps, some wood glue and some half-inch brads to repair that frame, but I'll make do with duct tape.

I suppose if a librarian were to require you to return the book you were borrowing within the hour, she'd "make due" said book.

Idioms are weird; old ones often don't make a lot of sense today. But "make do" does, while "make due" doesn't.

The one idiom that I always have to think about is "saying your piece."

You can "make peace" with someone and you can "hold your peace" at your ex-girlfriend's wedding, even if you know the guy she's marrying is completely wrong for her.

But in "saying your piece" you're offering a piece of your mind.

I suppose a paranoid gangster - Tony Soprano in Season 6, for instance - would forever "hold his piece," but then you never really equate James Gandolfini's character with peace, so perhaps that's a lousy example. Write carefully!

• Jim Baumann is vice president/managing editor of the Daily Herald. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com. Put Grammar Moses in the subject line. You also can friend or follow Jim at facebook.com/baumannjim.