Common English collocations, and why it's 'make a decision'.

“Make” collects an oddly specific set of dependents: a decision, a mistake, an effort, progress, sense, noise. Nothing links them grammatically. They just travel with “make,” and “do a decision” sounds nonstandard to most speakers in a way no verb conjugation table would predict.

No rule explains it. You just have to have heard it enough times to know.

“Do” runs the other half of the same household: research, homework, business, a favor. The guess that trips people up going this direction is “make research” – tidy-sounding, and simply wrong.

There’s no test for which tasks get “do” and which get “make.” Housework mostly takes “do” – the dishes, the laundry – except for one holdout. You still make the bed.

Weather takes “heavy” for rain, snow and traffic. Wind and smell take “strong” instead, for reasons most native speakers would struggle to explain.

Both words mean roughly “a lot of it.” English still sorts them by noun, not by meaning, and expects you to have absorbed the sorting somewhere along the way.

Sleep gets a third adjective. “Deep sleep” is the usual pairing; “heavy” more often describes the sleeper. The opposite of a deep sleeper isn’t a shallow one, either – English reaches for light sleeper instead, a completely different word doing the same job.

Three near-synonyms for “a lot” or “very” – heavy, deep, strong – and each has staked out its own set of nouns, with almost no overlap you could have guessed in advance.

“Raise” attaches to a child, to money and to your voice, and the three have nothing in common beyond the verb. Raising a child is decades of unglamorous work. Raising your voice is one bad minute in a meeting.

The verb doesn’t distinguish between them. It’s the same word whether the stakes are a lifetime or a single sentence.

Information, advice, furniture, luggage, news and equipment are usually uncountable in English, so they do not normally take a plural. To count one unit, English often reaches for a measure phrase: a piece of information, an item of luggage, or a piece of equipment.

You cannot say “an information.” You can say “a piece of information.” The workaround became so standard it stopped feeling like a workaround at all.

You catch a cold the way you’d catch a ball you didn’t ask for – it happens to you, not because of anything done on purpose. The same verb turns up in “catch your breath,” another thing the body does without being told.

“Get a cold” isn’t wrong, exactly. It just loses the sense of something landing on you uninvited that “catch” was built to carry.

“Pay” does several jobs where no money changes hands: pay attention, pay a visit, pay someone a compliment. The word frames attention as something spent – and people notice when none is handed over.

You have a temper the way you have brown eyes, but “lose your temper” isn’t about the trait – it’s about the one moment control slipped. The same verb covers losing patience, for the same reason.

“Lose” here doesn’t mean the temper goes missing and might turn up later. It means it got away from you, briefly, in front of people.

Progress belongs to “make,” same as decisions and mistakes – which is the useful part. Once the cluster is familiar, this stops being a separate fact to remember and starts being obvious.

Learn ten of these and the eleventh feels predictable. Learn one and it’s still just one.

A goal gets “set,” not “made,” which puts it in company with an example and a table, of all things. English verbs organize by habit here, not by category – nothing links a fitness goal to a place setting except the word the language happened to reach for.

A promise is kept or broken, rarely held – that’s reserved for hands and conversations. The same “keep” covers a secret, which suggests the language treats both as things you’re trusted not to let go of.

“Break a promise” reaches for the opposite verb entirely rather than an “un-keep.” Small proof, if any were needed, that none of this adds up to one tidy system.