There are many uses of the word take that you have to take metaphorically. “Take it away,” for example, might be an acknowledgment that your servants can clear the soup course, but it can also be an enthusiastic command from the talk-show host to his bandleader, who is certainly not literally transporting anything to another place. Take a look at how much space take takes up in most dictionaries.
You can take a bath on your investments. You can take after someone in two ways, by pursuing him down the street or by resembling him, either physically or in terms of outlook or character. Of course, the person that you are pursuing is taking off and taking a powder, and if he takes to the woods, he’ll probably escape. Strippers also take off garments, transitively; airplanes simply take off, intransitively.
Taking care is not the same as taking care of. Besides care, other things you can take are five (as Dave Brubeck memorably did), charge, command, credit, heart, holy orders, root, shape, shelter, stock, first things first, and a sucker for everything he’s got.
In the political arena, you can take the floor and filibuster for a week. You can also take the floor in a dance hall, but remember that it takes two to tango. You can take out from the deli, at the bridge table, and from your savings account. You can take out the trash and the enemy platoon. You can take out your anger on the wrong party.
I can hold out the dictionary to you and say, “Take this book,” and you will reach for it. I can also hold it up and say, “There are riches all around you. Take this book, for example.” A gullible person might easily get taken in by a flimflam man, in which case he won’t get taken for a wise person.
Is texting “OMG” an example of taking the Lord’s name in vain? If you take prisoners, they’re alive, but taking a deer means killing it. Taking a bishop puts him out of action on the chess board, so he’s probably more like a prisoner.
The fisherman can take in slack and the seamstress can take a tuck. Zeus took the form of a cloud with Io and a shower of gold with Danae. Being a god, it took him no trouble at all. And I imagine it didn’t take much time either.
To be indelicate, he also took Io and Danae. Miss Grant took Richmond in a romantic comedy of yore, and Lieutenant General Grant took Vicksburg 150 years ago next Fourth of July. And that takes the cake.
