At the 34:00 minute mark of the “Beanplating the Lunatic Fringe” episode of the podcast “A Way With Words,” linguists Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette address this.
Martha admits to growing up with “thing” but that “think” is the original. They also say that it is “an easy phonetic mistake to make.”
And that has been my position all along: That “think” is the original and “thing” originated as a mistake.
Those are simple facts. That isn’t a judgment call about which version is “correct” or which one is more common today.
Weak evidence that “think” is older. It’s based on finding print examples from over 100 years ago, so far from definitive, given that:
Both variants have been in use for 100 years or so.
In modern usage, “thing” is much more common, even after controlling for the Judas Priest effect on Googling; although both variants are still widespread.
Seriously, how can you, I, or anyone know what the ‘original’ expression was?
(All by itself, it sounds like what the person behind the counter at Long John Silver’s would say if you started to pull away after they’d only given you one of your two sides. “Not so fast, you’ve got another thing coming.” And then giving you the hush puppies you’d almost left without. But I digress.)
Again, your source of information about the evolution of this expression is…?
Ditto.
Oh yeah: when did this evolution supposedly happen?
I grew up in the late 50s and 60s in the western U.S., and I always heard and used “thing.” I didn’t hear “think” versions until later, probably the 70s, and assumed it was a jokey version of the original expression. In the above posts LSLGuy, from So. Cal, heard “thing” in the 50s, and ddsun, also growing up in So. Cal but in the 70s and 80s, heard “think.” That is right about the time I remember hearing think for the first time, which makes me wonder if think became more common during that decade. Thing makes more sense to me as an expression, as other posters have explained. Think is the joke version of it because think is so rarely used as a noun that it’s funny to insert it into the expression. I did once have to thnake the thewer under the think, but I botched the job horribly, and afterwards had a good hard think about what I’d done.
“got another think coming” first appeared in 1887 but began to take off in usage around 1905. It peaked in 1991.
“got another thing coming” did not even chart at all until 1965, and didn’t really begin to catch on until 1976. It experienced a sharp rise in 1995, due to the combined effects of '80s metal and '90s changes in pedagogical praxis that pulled the rug out from under spelling plus, I hypothesize, generally less cultural value accorded to literacy during the past quarter century.
Anyway, it has never been close. “Think” has always been far and away the cumulatively preferred expression, notwithstanding the erosion that “thing” has been wreaking on it for the past 20 years.
Thanks for the improved data. One of the Language Log links that I put up above has an instance of “thing” from 1919, but in light of your quantified data that looks like an isloated aberration.
In books, maybe. But not in current colloquial usage, where “thing” seems now to be well ahead. Or do you have another explanation for the ratio of Google hits (I realize that a simple count can sometimes be misleading)?
You need to be careful with this, since the colloquialism that we are targeting is rare. There are other unrelated sentences containing “have another thing coming”.
“There aren’t enough free periods in our class schedule. It’s hard to concentrate for a whole hour when you have another thing coming right afterwards.”
This USAian would certainly recognize that idiom. It sounds vaguely archaic, like something my dad might have said 40 years ago. Today I might instead say something more like “I’ll have to think again then let you know.” IOW use “think” as a verb not a noun.
Speaking just for me I use “thought” as a noun much more frequently than “think” as a noun. e.g. “I’ve had another thought about the problem. I now think we should do …”
Yeah, and if you look at it as “you have/got another think/thing coming”, the “think” one shows up first, too, and “you have another thing coming” doesn’t really start taking off until the 70s. See here.
My sense is that in non-jocular conversation, Americans tend to use jocular constructions much less often than British (and Indian) people.
I’ve sometimes been in situations in which a British or Indian person blurts out some bit of jocularity or sarcasm that it seems is so routine that it comes off as somewhat mandatory.
Whereas, my reaction as an American is something along the lines of (1) “This isn’t a jocular conversation, so what’s with the lame joke?” and (2) “You use that jocularity/sarcasm so much that you are wearing it out.”
But this is not a jocular construction in my dialect. British English, born in London in the 1960s, I speak pretty much “Received Pronunciation”. This is common and standard usage. Slightly informal, but not a hint of jocularity about it.
“I will think about it”
“I will have a think about it”
“I will give it some thought”
All equivalent for me.
[ETA: Do Americans just assume I’m joking the whole time? I have lived here for 15 years.]
No, Reiman, an American with a lick of sense will understand your usages just fine, just as that same American will know it’s “another think coming.” It’s amazing how many people in here have some kind of crazy explanation of why it should be “thing”, but there you are. I wish I had not read through this thread. I loved having the illusion that the SDMB is populated with intelligent people.