One take on take

Recently, in passing, during one of my ESOL lessons, I had to explain a bit about phrasal verbs. They were all familiar with them but had been thrown by "catch up with my work" and "keep up with the course" in a text they were reading.

It was, of course, only the work of a moment to define the terms but then they wanted to know what the "catch" in "catch up with" has to do with "catch" as in "catch the ball" or the "keep" in "keep up with" with "keep" as in "I'll keep it forever".

I managed to contrive a couple of highly speculative explanations but I do wonder sometimes about how the meanings of phrasal verbs develop from the root meaning of the particle-less non-phrasal verb.

Take "take" for example. Some years ago I spent a few weeks doing Cambridge FCE exam marking. (Hey, it's tedious but I was out of work and you have to put food on the table somehow.)

One of the sections was a gap fill into which a word needed to be inserted after "take" to make the sentence make sense. I can't remember what the actual question was, but I do remember the incredible array of answers that were presented. Let's have a look at just a few of the many possibilities.

take - get, sieze, capture, grasp

take on - accept responsibility for, make a fuss

take off - leave the ground, remove (clothing), impersonate, run away

take in - deceive, comprehend, give shelter to

take out - go on a date with, kill

take up - start something new, accept an offer

take down - make notes, remove, kill

take up on - accept an offer

take after - resemble

Now in a few of these I can see a connection either between the phrasal verb and the main verb or between two meanings of the same phrasal form but for most of them I'm baffled as to how the meaning developed.

For example, I can see that "take off", meaning run away, might develop metaphorically from the aviation meaning as when your plane takes off you are going somewhere... but how on Earth did it also come to mean "impersonate"? And what do any of these meanings have to do with "get, sieze, capture, grasp"?

And "take on" for "accept responsibility" seems a slight extension of "get" but what about when it means "Make a fuss"? Where did that come from?

And how did the modern meaning of "I'll take them out" (kill) develop from "I'll take them out" (treat)?

Not to mention that if you take something in you understand it but if you take someone in you might be doing a kindly act in giving them shelter or a despicable one in deceiving them. Why?

I've had a couple of book recommendations from a usually reliable source on one of the language boards that I post on so I'll be trying to hunt them down to read up on all of this. Meanwhile I'll just have to go on making it up in class and hoping that nobody notices.