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

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:38 AM -0400 5/1/08, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>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."
>
...which brings up a point I'd been intending to mention (sorry--I
got behind on my e-mail during the end-of-term avalanche).  For me it
was always "have another think coming", and I always assumed it was
indeed prompted by the echo context (or what Bolinger calls
second-instance occurrences), as Ben suggests, along with the
playfulness Arnold notes.  Three other instances of these conjoined
phenomena of jocularity and syntagmatic priming:

(i)  "I know so", only occurring naturally (for me) in the context of
"I don't (just) *think* so, I *know* so."

(ii) the positive/contrastive use of negative polarity items, as in
"I do so give a damn/shit/fuck", or similar locutions.  Thus these
passages from Susan Isaacs' 1993 novel, _After All These Years_:

"...And do you think that with all my problems I give a damn about
yours?...Well," I added, "that's not precisely true.  I do give a
damn."  [p. 234]

"If I get caught, they'll catch you too," I explained in my honors
English class voice.
"Do you think I give a shit?" he yelled.  He stood and kicked the
couch... "As a matter of fact," he continued, "I don't give a flying
fuck!".
"When you're doing five to ten you'll give a flying fuck!"  [p. 251]

(The occurrence in an NPI context may be inaudible but culturally
salient, as in the "Give a damn!" billboards awhile back, the title
of Davina Kotulski's book _Why You Should Give a Damn About Gay
Marriage_ or the Jo Dee Messina country song, and T-shirt spinoff,
"My Give A Damn's Busted".)

(iii) the extension of semi-productive morphology, as in

"This growth in public acceptance really bothers me, because part of
the allure of sex is that it's taboo," said Waitt. "But it's become
very untaboo now."

(similarly in other attested cases, "unobscene", which only seems to
occur in a local context in which "obscene" has previously occurred,
and likewise "un-smug" and "unsullen")

LH

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