Please, make me a picture

That’s how many Europeans say it, I noticed. They don’t say, “Could you please take a picture for me.” They say, “Please, could you make a picture for me.”

It sounds unusual to English speakers like most of us because we take, not make pictures.

It got me to thinking why. And I think I won’t be wrong to say that “make a picture” is a literal translation from the user’s own language.

It’s like how the Chinese always get “he” and “she” confused because in Chinese there is no difference.

Make me a picture.

Is that correct?

I reasoned that in the very technical sense, it is in fact, correct. And that TAKE a picture, is actually not. We, in the literal sense, cannot take a picture. We can pick up (the act of taking) a printed photograph of a picture, but can we pick up the vision before us?

Now, to MAKE a picture. When we click the shutter button, what we in fact do, is to create on film/ digital pixels the vision we see through the lenses. Isn’t that the making of a picture?

The English language is actually quite “aggressive”, if you think about it. So, I quite like the way Europeans say it ☺