You can't bring it with you (or maybe you can)

Like any enforcer of an institutional style, the New York Times’s Philip Corbett has to defend certain distinctions well into their obsolescence. One of his probably-lost causes came up in a December After Deadline blog post:

A Met official took the stage to say Ms. White had suffered a short fall and was brought to the hospital.*

Here’s what the stylebook says:

bring, take. Use bring to mean movement toward the speaker or writer; take means movement away from the speaker or writer (in fact, any movement that is not toward the speaker or writer). So the Canadian prime minister cannot be bringing a group of industrialists to a conference in Detroit, except in an article written from Detroit.

I grew up following this rule -- or, rather, not knowing there was any other way to use bring and take;  you bring something with you when you come, and take it when you go. And when I asked Boston Globe readers about their usage, in a 1998 column ($ except for subscribers), 73 percent said they did it my way.

But over the years I've gotten used to hearing bring where I would say take -- "I'll bring this to New York," for instance, spoken by a husband sitting next to me in Boston. And even when I was still suspicious of that bring, it was clear that bring and take often hovered on an imaginary threshold, with only the speaker knowing which point of view was assumed: "Shall we bring/take an umbrella?" (See Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage for a thorough and sympathetic analysis.)

I don't think I'm alone in my growing tolerance for that minority use of bring, because I keep seeing it in respectable publications. I haven't gone looking for examples, but the usage is still odd enough to my ear that I (sometimes) notice it; here are a few cites I've clipped in the past year or so.

This week, I tested three computer mice that laptop users will actually want to bring along with them. (Katherine Boehret, Wall Streeet Journal, January 2011)

Burch wraps up a slice of cake and two cupcakes for me to bring home to my daughter. (Daphne Merkin, NYT T Magazine, December 2011)

So Wayne and Judy took over their son’s care, bringing him [from Memphis] first to a premier brain-injury center in Atlanta  ... and then to a clinic in Destin, Fla. (Jeneen Interlandi, NYT Magazine, December 2011)

[If the world were going to end in December 2012] I’d love to bring my family to the Serengeti to see migrating herds of zebra and gazelles. (Scott Simon, WSJ, January 2012)

And here's one that uses both verbs alternately:

Bring This Checklist with You Next Time You’re Apartment Hunting
Just print it out and take it with you when you're at an apartment showing ... You may also want to bring your camera along so you can take a few photos.
(Adam Dachis, Lifehacker.com, January 2012)

[Edited to add this example, 2/2/2012:]

At some point, most adoptive families do bring their children back to China.  (Good Housekeeping magazine, January 2012)

I haven't seen an example yet in the New Yorker, but it sure looks as if certain NYT and WSJ editors think bring sounds normal in these contexts. I'm not there yet myself, but since I'm no longer a working editor, I don't plan to lose any sleep over the question.

* I'd make it "had suffered a short fall and was (had) been brought to the hospital," but Corbett didn't comment on the lack of parallelism.