"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

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list