"thing/think" [was: on the eggcorn beat]
Benjamin Zimmer
bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
Thu May 1 14:38:33 UTC 2008
On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 10:14 AM, Arnold M. Zwicky
<zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>
> On May 1, 2008, at 7:01 AM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> and even if these uses hadn't been around, any verb is available for
> nonce nouning -- *especially* in playful inventions, which i've always
> taken this one to be.
Indeed. The playful use of "think" is even more evident in the fuller
version of the expression, "If you think X about Y, then you have
another think coming."
--Ben Zimmer
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