"thing/think" [was: on the eggcorn beat]

[ronbutters at AOL.COM]

How can " think" in "have another think coming" be original when "think" isn't a noun? I.e., if you don't have a single think, how can you have
another think?

I always assumed it was an example of folk humor and pseudofolk dialect. It never occurred to me that it could be "thing" and not "think." Cf. "Who'da thunk?"
------Original Message------
From: Benjamin Zimmer
Sender: ADS-L
To: ADS-L
ReplyTo: ADS-L
Sent: May 1, 2008 10:01 AM
Subject: Re: [ADS-L] "thing/think" [was: on the eggcorn beat]

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 9:14 AM, Cohen, Gerald Leonard <gcohen at mst.edu> wrote:
>
>  How can " think" in "have another think coming" be original when "think"
>  isn't a noun? I.e., if you don't have a single think, how can you have
>  another think?

OED has the noun "think" in the sense "an act of (continued) thinking; a
meditation" from 1834 and in the sense "what one thinks about something; an
opinion" from 1835. Beyond "have another think coming", it survives in other
contexts, such as "have a (good/serious/proper) think about X". It's not
present in my dialect either, but it evidently remains common in the UK and
Australia.


--Ben Zimmer

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