"take (do) exercise"

[Laurence Urdang]

I think it important to distinguish between collocations, which are syntactic combinations that occur frequently in the "idiom" of the language, and idioms, which are more or less frozen expressions that are often unanalyzable.  Red herring  is an example of the latter, pickled herring of the former.
  Unfortunately, as I said in a paper presented in 1953 at Columbia University, English does not make the convenient distinction made in French between idiome 'the way a language is spoken' and idiotisme 'a fixed, unanalyzable expression' using idiom for both, ambiguously. Thus take in 'deceive' is an idiom; take in as in take in the newspaper, a mere collocation.  One can catalogue idioms; because they are productive, it would be impossible (and useless) to catalogue collocations.  They exhibit the "spirit" of a language, and one can often easily identify a nonnative speaker because his collocations are unfamiliar even though they might be perfectly grammatical.
  Take/Do/Make/Engage in/ . . . and whatever else you want to do with exercise is simple English syntax: none of these is an idiom, per se; they are all collocations, some more frequent than others.
  L,. Urdang

Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Charles Doyle
Subject: "take (do) exercise"
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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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