"take (do) exercise"

[Charles Doyle]

Or "GET (some) exercise."

"Get exercise": 211,000 raw Google hits.
"Get some exercise": 341,000.

--Charlie
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---- Original message ----
>Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2007 14:44:06 -0400
>From: Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
>Subject: "take (do) exercise"
>
>Yesterday as I prepared to go running (it was a rare unsmoky day in Georgia), I said to my wife, "I've got to go take some exercise." As I heard myself, I remarked (to myself)that "take" in that construction sounds archaic. Nowadays, most prople would say "do some exercise" or just "exercise."
>
>The OED does not seem to enter the (idiomatic?) phrase "take exercise" per se, though it uses the phrase in a handful of definitions (in fact, the definition of "exercise" v.6d is "to take exercise"). Scattered through the OED, the phrase appears in quotations from a1859, 1865, 1886, and 1900.
>
>The OED shows the phrase "do exercise" in several quotations, but only with "do" as an auxiliary, not a transitive verb--except by a possible reading of a quotation from 1994.
>
>Google gives a fairly modest 115,000 raw hits for "take exercise" (plus another 14,800 for "take some exercise"). There are 283,000 hits for "do exercise" (in some of which, I assume, "exercise" is a verb and "do" an auxiliarly).
>
>--Charlie
>_____________________________________________________________
>
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>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org