Should you say "Bathe, bath, or baff?"

Last week I was huddled over my computer at my office desk when a conversation filtered in through the lull of the music playing in my earphones. One of my colleagues, in describing the way his morning went, had said, "I took my bathe," and the office was in a light uproar over the blunder. They clowned him, as friends often do, and had a laugh at his expense. He took it like a champ. 

But the incident forced me to think more deeply about why he made the mistake he did, especially knowing I had observed other people make the same mistake at different times. I myself struggled with it for a time.

In Nigeria, it is common to hear people say:

"I want to baff"

"I want to bath"

"I took my bathe"

I thought it only right to confirm the correct expression and serve it up here. 
_____________________________________________________________________________________

A bath is different from a shower.

A shower  is an enclosure in your general bathroom area where you stand to clean your body.

A bath is a shortening of 'bathtub' and describes an amenity that allows the groomer to sit or lie and have a soak. 

I had a shower/I took a showered quickly/I showered quickly
If you just stood and washed your body without having a soak, what you had is a shower. Another distinction for many people is whether or not the groomer used a sponge in their cleaning venture but that's not a distinction we are making here.

Shower is both a noun and a verb.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Don't say:

                  I baffed or I want to baf

                 I bathed (where the 'a' sounds like the 'a' in 'hat')

Say:

              I had a bath or I took a bath

              I bathe daily or I bathed him in kisses of delight (said as: /bay-thed/ like the 'a' in 'cake')

I had a bath/I took a bath/I bathe daily/I bathed him in kisses of delight
If you filled the tub (or bathtub) with water, got in it and soaked your body for any length of time and then proceeded in whatever fashion to finish the grooming process, then you had a bath or took a bath.

Hopefully this helps. I hope to make a follow up post to give explanations and principles. I wanted to keep this short.

Have you ever struggled with the right expression? How did you resolve it?

Dedicated to: Dimeji.