Sometime last December, my reading of the day’s newspapers was brought to a halt by this jaw-dropping piece of English: “Therefore, the government should recognize the film industry as an essential commodity. It should be
taken cared of so that it flourishes and gives back beneficial returns to a caring government.”
I won’t touch on the peculiar semantics and construction of this statement because that would require a much longer discussion than this column will allow. I will only focus on its erroneous use of “taken cared of” and, later, on its inappropriate use of the simple present tense for the relative clause “that it flourishes and gives back beneficial returns to a caring government.”
The phrase “take care of,” as we all know, is an idiom that means “to attend to or assume responsibility.” In that idiom, “take” is a verb and “care” is a noun, and people usually have no problem using the phrase in the simple tenses: “My secretary
takes care of all the office details.” “A lawyer
took care of the inheritance papers.” “Don’t worry about your visas because I’ll
take care of them.”
It is when people use “take care of” in its past perfect form that the problem usually arises. In fact, when I made a quick check with Google as I wrote this column, it reported some 39,900 entries erroneously using “taken cared of” for the past perfect of that phrase. A sampling of the entries: “All concerns, down to the payment of electricity bills and utilities, are
taken cared of by the professional hotel management operator.” “They are
taken cared of by the [name of school] family to grow and develop as persons, learners and scholars.”
(The surprising thing is that among the Google entries, which are drawn from all over the world, there appeared to be an abnormally high incidence of “taken cared of” usage among Filipino writers, particularly in journalism and academe. Could it be that sometime in the recent past, some local English grammar authority had inadvertently taught and spread that wrong usage among the populace?)
Although substantial, the incidence of “taken cared of” usage is thankfully only about 2.6 percent of the 1,540,000 Google entries that used the correct past perfect form of the phrase: “taken care of.” Two of the entries that used it correctly: “We could not increase spending for any programs until our core programs for veterans and the poor were
taken care of.” “I live in the Netherlands and have
taken care of my dad for years.”
Remember now that the past participle expresses completed action and is used in (1) forming the perfect tenses in the active voice, and (2) forming all tenses in the passive voice. As we all know, most verbs typically take the suffix “-ed” to form past participles, as in the past participle “finished” for the regular verb “finish.” The irregular verb “take,” however, takes the past participle “taken.”
In the active voice, the perfect tenses for “taken” are preceded by the appropriate form of the auxiliary verb “have”: “had taken” for the past perfect, “has taken/have taken” for the present perfect, and “will have taken” for the future perfect. In the passive voice, on the other hand, the perfect tenses for “taken” are preceded by the appropriate form of the auxiliary “have been”: “had been taken” for the past perfect, “has/have been taken” for the present perfect, and “will have been taken” for the future perfect.
When these rules are applied to the idiom “take care of,” keep in mind that only the verb “take” will inflect by changing to the past participle “taken.” The noun “care” will remain unchanged because in English, nouns don’t inflect with changes in tense; only verbs do. Thus, the correct form in the perfect tense of “take care of” is not “taken cared of” but “taken care of.” (2007)
This essay, 519th in the series, first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times
in its January 8, 2007 issue, © 2007 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.The Manila Times
ran one column on “The importance of grammar-perfect English” series each week for seven weeks in 2006-2007, and my Facebook Gateway to the Forum is now running one of them every three days in succession on February 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, and 21, 2017 for the benefit of new Forum members and English learners. (Next:
The importance of grammar-perfect English – III (February 12, 2017 )
