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

[Wilson Gray]

"If you think that, then you have another think coming!" is one of my
mother's favorite clichés, when she's pitching a bitch. I've heard it
under that circumstance all of my life and I hate it hearing it, for
that reason. Since she was born in 1913, my guess is that, if "think"
isn't original, then it's at least a relatively old reanalysis.
Besides, why couldn't a person use "think" as a noun, if he wanted to?
We are discussing English, after all.

OTOH, FWIW, I've never heard my mother or anyone else say, "If you
thing that, then you have another thing coming!"

-Wilson

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 2:01 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "thing/think" [was: on the eggcorn beat]
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
 -Sam'l Clemens

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