Bring vs. Take

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Fri Feb 11 21:52:56 UTC 2011


On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 12:10 PM, George Thompson
<george.thompson at nyu.edu> wrote:

> Is this a Pennsylvania thing?

It may very well be! My wife is so pissed off by the "misuse" of these
two verbs that I sometimes stutter when I have to use one of them,
lest I choose incorrectly.

You know, when I was taking Hebrew at UC Davis, the textbook that we
used made a big thing of the fact that the use of _bring_ and _take_
is, in some now-forgotten sense (though the book devoted a page of
drawings - a guy carrying something and entering and leaving a house -
and a page and a half of text into attempting to clarify the issue,
the prof didn't sweat us - Is this gonna be on the final? - about it,
so I've forgotten the details; FWIW, the title of the book was in
Hebrew and contained the word, _Shiloah_ - or maybe that *was* the
title) very different from the use of these verbs in English.

--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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



More information about the Ads-l mailing list