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!!
2 comments:
Language Lady,
Why do the young people these days use the word random all the time? It's really not amusing anymore, but sometimes they are correct in it's useage. Do they feel that they have no control over their collective futures and think that life is a random process or series of events? Are they right?
SOMD Dad
Dear Anonymous,
Your question was so random, it took me a while to come up with an answer. Now, after asking some adolescents fluent in “random-speak,” I have come up with the following:
Random is a word that teens/20-somethings often substitute for “unexpected,” “weird/strange,” or “I didn’t know that.” As you point out, it is also occasionally used in the traditional sense of “not in any order or plan.” That’s why you hear it so much – because they’re using it in at least three times as many ways as we might have.
Where we would say, for example, “The strangest thing just happened,” teens might say, “The most random thing just happened.”
Also: My son finds out that two of his friends that he knows from different places are good friends themselves. “You guys know each other? That’s so random!” Whereas we might have said, “I didn’t know you guys knew each other! Small world,” or something staid and corny like that.
As for “unexpected,” it’s a key word in this instance:
“Mom, do you think you could not make some random appearance while me and my friends are watching a movie downstairs?” (the “me and my friends” is a whole other topic!)
So, the use/overuse of “random” boils down to word fashion and culture, not some random 21st century adolescent insight into the universal order of things.
-The Language Lady
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