What is the difference between bring and take

This typically happens in phone calls and emails, when the two people are in direct communication but different locations. Look at these emails: I'm leaving Bangkok tonight. My flight lands in London at 6 tomorrow. Do you want me to bring some T-shirts? Hi Fred. And it's take-out food, not bring-out food. You're taking the food from the restaurant to a destination: out. Second, if I'm sitting at home feeling lazy and wishing dinner would appear, I might say, "I wish someone would just bring me dinner.

From my perspective, they will bring me dinner because dinner is coming to my location. It simply depends on where you want to place the emphasis of the sentence—which perspective you want to adopt. If you want to focus on the cookout and write from the perspective of the lake, you say they brought her to the cookout, imagining everyone at the lake in the future. If you want to focus on the here and now and write from the perspective of home, then you say they will take her to the cookout which puts the focus on taking her away from your house.

Since your French friend used "bring," maybe she was already imagining everyone at the cookout. The past tense of 'bring' As an aside, in some dialects the past tense of "bring" is "brang" or "brung," and "brung" appears in the saying "dance with the one that brung you," which appears to have originated from a song from the s and has been used by politicians to justify being loyal to the people who helped get them elected.

What about 'come' and 'go'? Another interesting note is that the words "come" and "go" follow rules that are similar to those for "bring" and "take. A number of people have told me that Irish speakers handle "bring" and "take" differently.

Apparently Irish speakers use "bring" in more circumstances than American or British speakers would. For example, Wikipedia says an Irish speaker would think it is fine to say "Bring your umbrella with you when you leave," even though the American and British rules favor "take" in that sentence.

According to a commenter on the blog going by simbad, in Irish, "take" has more to do with transferring possession than changing location. But while it's true that we use bring for motion towards "bring it here" and take for motion away "take it away" , native speakers of English also use bring and take in cases irrespective of motion.

Sometimes, it's unclear what the direction of the motion is. If you're to be the dictionary-bearer in someone's stead, you will deliver the dictionary they're giving you to your favorite pub, which means that the dictionary is moving toward you initially, but then you and the dictionary are moving away from wherever you are as you proceed to the pub.

They can reasonably ask you to bring or take the dictionary with you. The goings-on in the speaker's mind also come into play. If you're looking forward to your next pub visit and intend to find a place there for a pristine copy of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary , you may murmur to yourself, "Don't forget to bring the dictionary.

You could likewise murmur, "Don't forget to take the dictionary," the journey to the pub not yet being undertaken in your mind. While those who feel strongly about such things would denounce the first murmuration as a linguistic travesty, its use of bring dates back at least as far as the Bard himself. In "Much Ado About Nothing," the constable Dogberry has gone before a magistrate with news of the capture of a couple of suspicious characters whom he would like the magistrate to examine; the magistrate is in haste to be elsewhere and tells Dogberry to examine the men himself.

As the magistrate leaves, Dogberry says to his partner Verges:. The terms bring and take are often confused, and for good reason. Both words describe the movement of something from one location to another. Bring describes the movement of something toward a specified location. According to this convention, you can bring food to a party, but not take food to a party. If Maria is having a potluck, her guests might ask her: Is there anything we can bring?

Maria might tell her guests: Bring something to drink, and of course you can bring a friend.