This Holiday Season
Take Your TIME
To Make A Difference.
The above message, from the tres chic Swiss French watch companies, Baume & Mercier and Torneau, is written on a fancy, blue silk banner that for the past month has been hanging on every lamppost in the heart of Midtown-New York, along Lexington, Park, Madison, and Fifth Avenues – and it has been driving me crazy at every turn.
If you are among the majority who fails to find anything grammatically awry with that phrase, then please take time to consider that phrase; but there’s no need to rush – just take your time.
Okay. Have you spotted how the banner has managed to mangle two “time” expressions and merge them into one – and one, that if you take time to think about it, makes no sense:
“To take your time” is a phrase suggesting that someone use any amount of minutes, hours, or days to accomplish something. (Ex: She took her time writing the cover letter to send along with her resume.) Note that “to take your time” is followed by an “ing” word, or gerund.
“To take time,” on the other hand, means to set aside some moment or other in order to do something. (Ex: How can you write a book if you don’t take time to write?) This phrase is followed by an infinitive, or “to + base verb form” (i.e “to come,” “to do,” etc. are infinitives).
The distinction between these two common expressions may sound subtle, but I’ve never heard or seen them confused before in conversation or print. Why now? Baume & Mercier’s/Tourneau’s banner should say either, “Take Time to Make a Difference,” (set aside some moments from shopping or partying to do something nice for someone else) or “Take Your Time Making a Difference” (meaning, take all the hours or days you need to do something nice for someone else). But the way they wrote it, the sentence means neither.
But that’s not the only thing that gets me.
What really gets me is, Not Even My Own Mother – that universal standard for judging something’s worthiness – thought this subject was worth wondering about, much less writing about. Supporting my normally grammar-conscious mother was a group of blank faces of seemingly well-educated, native English-speaking Americans who I tested the phrase on at a party. “Sounds okay to me,” was the general consensus; meanwhile, Mom suggested I turn my attention to bigger bloopers.
But if Mom had seen the size and quantity of those banners, she’d realize how big a blooper that phrase was. This holiday season I have taken way too much time pondering how Baume & Mercier/Tourneau could have let this linguistically unfortunate phrase slip through the various levels of corporate art direction and bureaucracy to have those banners end up on those lampposts.
Perhaps this phrase is an unwitting example of how language changes in the 21st century: It starts with a big, expensive ad campaign with millions of people uncaring or unaware of some grammatical slip as they walk past the words; in time, they start saying things like, “Take your time to watch TV,” or “Did you take your time to listen to the words on that CD?” In time, I suppose I’ll be able to guess what the person means. For now, it still sounds mangled. Or is it just me?
The generally blasé reaction to this banner seems proof that English is fragmenting and morphing right under our native-speaking noses. Some of us cling longer to our linguistic ways, only to realize that a living language is a verbal sandcastle at high tide. Things change …
Speaking of which … goodbye, 2007 and Happy New Year, everyone!!
