Another think, again

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Fri May 23 16:41:39 UTC 2008


Nope. It's just that some people, i.e., William Safire, write as
though a word or a turn of phrase came into existence, for all
practical purposes, only after someone wrote it down. Needless to say,
this may in fact be the case, but not necessarily.

-Wilson

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 10:05 AM, Marc Velasco <marcjvelasco at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Marc Velasco <marcjvelasco at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Another think, again
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>>> Are "date of origin" and "date of earliest-known citation" necessarily
>>> coincidental?
>
> Is the question trying to get at something other than the difference
> between dates of spoken usage and dates of written usage?
>
>
>
> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 9:37 AM, Benjamin Zimmer
> <bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
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>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
>> Subject:      Re: Another think, again
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 8:08 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> At 5/23/2008 07:32 AM, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>>>>Here are the earliest citations we have so far:
>>>>
>>>>-----
>>>>
>>>>http://books.google.com/books?id=LAYNAAAAYAAJ
>>>>1904 _Wilshire's Magazine_ (Feb.) in _Wilshire Editorials_ (1906) 214
>>>>Now if we should try and think up some one person who is satisfied
>>>>with the existing order of things and upon whose lips is the cry: "Let
>>>>well enough alone, Stand pat," we would most likely have thought that
>>>>we should find him in the editor of the Wall Street Journal. But if we
>>>>did, then we have another thing coming, for this is the cry-baby talk
>>>>I find in this morning's (Dec. 16) editorial.
>>>
>>> Shouldn't this be excluded as the earliest, since "another thing
>>> coming" parallels the earlier "satisfied with the existing order of *things*"?
>>
>> Interesting, I hadn't considered possible influence from the word
>> "things" in the previous sentence. That could play a factor, but
>> methinks it's still the "think" frame, if rather obscured by ellipsis:
>>
>>  If we should try and think up some one person...
>>  But if we did [try and think up...] then we have another thing coming.
>>
>> The 1919 example ("If you think the life of a movie star is all
>> sunshine and flowers you've got another thing coming") is more
>> explicit in its framing. But note that the early "another think" exx
>> aren't rigidly formulaic either:
>>
>> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004972.html
>>
>> The 1897 Washington Post example uses "Another 'think' coming to them"
>> as a headline, with the framing occurring in the body of the article
>> ("Methodist conference members from throughout the country think...").
>> And the 1898 Chicago Tribune example puts the frame in a separate
>> sentence rather than a conditional clause ("Chicago thinks it wants a
>> new charter. Chicago has another think coming").
>>
>> So I don't think we're necessarily dealing with a fixed proverb/saying
>> but rather a loose template (snowclone?) that was sometimes phrased
>> rather allusively. Or perhaps the fixity of the paradigmatic "If you
>> think that X,  you've got another think coming" was in flux early on,
>> which could have allowed for the "thing" reanalysis at a very early
>> stage.
>>
>> I also wonder if the "thing" usage in some of the early examples could
>> have been a miscorrection, imposed by editors who were unfamiliar with
>> the "another think" turn of phrase.
>>
>> --Ben Zimmer
>>
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>>
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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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