Today’s Pearls Before Swine, in which Rat lives up to his name:
The crucial point: take you to lunch in the context of birthday greetings to Goat — in this context, clearly an instance of the phrasal idiom I’ll label take someone to (‘host someone at (an event), treat someone to (an event)’), and so understood by Goat (and, I think, by all readers of this strip); but then, in a kind of lexicographic bait and switch, Rat maintains that he meant only the caused-motion verb take (‘convey something to (an event at) some place’) and takes no responsibility for paying for the occasion
Then, in an appendix to this main discussion, I expose my bafflement at the treatment of the phrasal idiom take someone to in dictionaries: I can’t find one that lists it (while treat someone to is well covered).
The ambiguity that Rat exploits. First, the caused-motion verb, from NOAD:
verb take: (with object) 3. carry or bring with one; convey
So: I took Terry to the corner of Hamilton and Emerson in Palo Alto (where there happen to be restaurants at two of the four corners); this caused-motion verb take is in a class with verbs like bring, drive, carry, transport, wheel.
A new lexical item. Now consider
I took Terry to a restaurant at the corner of Hamilton and Emerson in Palo Alto; I took Terry to the Peninsula Creamery; I took Terry to Nobu Palo Alto
which can be used to implicate that the conveying was done to provide Terry with the resources (food and drink, in this case) available at that location. If hearers begin to understand the providing of these resources as the real point of these wordings, then they can downplay, in fact suppress, the motional part of such examples — yielding a new item take ‘host, treat’ (compare treat someone to ‘provide someone with (food, drink, or entertainment) at one’s own expense’).
Which will then be the most likely understanding of things like:
I took Terry to Nobu Palo Alto for their birthday
and the only available understanding of:
Meet me in front of the Aquarius Theater at 2 and I’ll take you to a fabulous movie
(where caused motion is excluded).
In any case the expression take someone to is now ambiguous between the two senses. And is open to Rat’s schemes.
The development of the new sense is then roughly similar to shift from change in location to action consequent to this change in go to the bathroom, yielding a new item go ‘urinate or defecate’. The expression go to the bathroom is then ambiguous between the two senses.
take someone to in the dictionaries. Given NOAD‘s listing of treat someone to ‘provide someone with (food, drink, or entertainment) at one’s own expense’, I expected the dictionary to have a similar entry for take someone to ‘host, treat’. But no. With considerable trepidation, I consulted the OED — trepidation because I knew I was facing a list of hundreds of uses of the verb take, and potentially most of a morning patiently going through that list.
If take someone to ‘host, treat’ is in there, I didn’t find it. Nor did I find it in net searches through other dictionaries. Maybe I’m a bad searcher, but I kept thinking that the task shouldn’t be hard, since the ‘host, treat’ meaning as distinct from the ‘convey’ meaning is not at all a subtle thing; the point of the Pearls strip is immediately understandable to readers (I did a check on three generations of my family; nobody needed an explanation of the joke). Is the item so very recent that it hasn’t made it into any dictionary? Am I suffering from the Antiquity Illusion?
For the moment I have a mystery.
[Addendum later in the day. Benita Bendon Campbell dredged up songs from her memory to show that the usage has been around for a long time, and providing the basis for a solution to the mystery:
— the Weavers song from 1951 “The Roving Kind”, with the line “I took her for some fish and chips and treated her so fine” (listen on YouTube here)
— the Frank Sinatra song from 1961 “When I Take My Sugar to Tea” (“all the boys are jealous of me”) (listen on YouTube here)
Presumably lexicographers took these to be instances of conveyance take someone to, not realizing that they were in fact of a different but homophonous lexical item, treat take someone to. Now we have Rat to show us the error in that analysis.]
[Addendum from 11/16, two more cites by BBC:
— the 1952 pop song “There’s a Pawn Shop on the Corner in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania”, with the lines: “Took her dancin’, took her dinin’ / Til her blue eyes were shinin'”
— the 1908 waltz song “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”, with the treat variant take someone out to
The latter of which gets us back to over a century ago.]
November 16, 2025 at 7:21 am |
Another song from the 1950s or early ’60s, on Stan Freberg’s album “History of the United States of America, the Early Years”: “Take an Indian to lunch – this week”.