"take (do) exercise"

[Amy West]

A similiarly archaic-sounding (to my ears) "take N" that I heard my
mother use once was "take travel." It sounded very odd to me, but I
could see it being parallel to "take trips."

---Amy West

>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.

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