Difference between get away from and take away from

Question

Please explain the difference between get ... away from ... and take ... away from ... .

For example: They get the children away from the TV. They take the rubbish away from the house.

when we use get away and when take away?

Answer 1

To get away from ... has several meanings (see Wiktionary), including "to move away from ...". Here's an example from Wiktionary:

Get away from the edge of the cliff!

In the phrase "get the children away from the TV", get is used as a transitive verb (i.e. it has an object: "the children"), whereas the Wiktionary example uses get in an intransitive manner. However, the meaning is similar. The idea is to move the children away from the television by making them do something else (e.g. play outside).

To take [something] away (from) is always used in a transitive manner; see the examples in Wiktionary. The first meaning is, "To remove something and put it in a different place." So the sentence "They take the rubbish away from the house" refers to rubbish removal.

Some examples of "take away":

• "Now dustmen won't take your rubbish away if wheelie bin is too heavy to pull with two fingers" (article title, Daily Mail, 07.06.2008)
• "They took away his tube of wasabi at the airport and he didn't get it back." (Independent, 18.11.2011)
• "What I Took Away From CXDay In London, UK" (blog post title; meaning: "what I learnt from ..."; The Customer & Leadership Blog, 08.10.2014)

When "take away" uses people as (grammatical) object, these people are usually moved elsewhere without their consent. "They took away the children" could mean "they [=some public authority] took the children into custody" or even "they kidnapped the children". See e.g.:

• "The courts took my children away from me because I'm a working mother" (article title, Daily Mail, 02.09.2009)
• "Social services took my children" (article title, The Telegraph, 26.02.2011)
• "The experience of the transatlantic slave trade took the enslaved Africans away from their roots." (a slightly different meaning than the above; Port Cities - Bristol, no date)