"take (do) exercise"

[Charles Doyle]

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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