I keep seeing both word being used for one person "guiding" a second person to a location. For example:
o I brought John to the store.
o I took John to the store.
Which do you believe is correct and why?
I keep seeing both word being used for one person "guiding" a second person to a location. For example:
o I brought John to the store.
o I took John to the store.
Which do you believe is correct and why?
Personally, in today's use of language, I think they're interchangeable. But Grammar Girl gets to the nuts and bolts of the two.
Whether you use "bring" or "take" generally depends on your point of reference for the action. You ask people to bring things to the place you are, and you take things to the place you are going. As one listener named Simone put it, you bring things here and take things there.
Exceptions: 'Bring' and 'take'
The simple rules fall apart though when, as Garner's Modern English Usage puts it, "the movement has nothing to do with the speaker."
Do you describe your French friend's co-worker as bringing her to the cookout at the lake or taking her to the cookout at the lake?
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).
It's really all a matter of how you imagine the situation and where you want to put the perspective or emphasis.
You might say that since your French friend is the speaker, she should use "take" because she's being taken away from your house, but even that isn't so simple.
Here's another example:
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage says you can use either "bring" or "take" when "the notion of direction is irrelevant to the audience" or if someone is imagining they are in another location.
I've always used both, as predictably, I believe in the power of precise words.
"I took John to the store," implies not the destination, but the act of guidance. So it's not so much, "we went to the store together", as much as it is, "I showed him the store, the neighborhood, and explained where to find things and who to speak to."
If it's only defined by the destination, you miss every nuance of the word.
Whereas, "I brought John to the store", means only that "I delivered John to the destination," as a cabbie could just as easily have brought him to the same place.
Thus "took" implies guidance, whereas "brought" implies a delivery to somewhere. As with most verbs, and the verb-phrases, the adverb modifies the action, nothing else. However, these are two separate, but related verbs, yet thinking of them in terms of the applicable adverbs helps to establish the context.
Yet, for anyone unused to such precise uses of the verbs, few would ever notice any difference at all.