another thing, or think

[eub]

I ran across a Metafilter thread about the expression "if you think that, you've got another (think/thing) coming." If this is a familiar stock expression to you, which version is familiar, "thing" or "think"? Have you heard the other version?
(Warning: the thread is a mashup of this think/thing with an "is 0.999repeating = 1" debate; skim over unless that's something you enjoy.)

My dad and I agreed that it's a familiar expression, and we'd never heard anyone using the wrong word in it, that would sound bizarre, why is there even a thread about this. But it turned out we disagreed on which word is the right one. The usage in the wild is definitely mixed (it skews "thing" in Google web search, "think" in n-gram books search), and he and I apparently each inferred one correct usage, and assimilated the other one to it, without even noticing the mixedness. Yay language.

(Historically, the "think" version appears to have come first as a stock phrase, carrying a "comically unusual grammar" flavor. The "thing" probably came from rationalizing it, and a small phonetic step given that the doubled /k/ sound in "think coming" is commonly reduced. (The OED2 has an earlier cite for "thing", but since its publication they have pushed "think" earlier.))

Comments

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

When you've read it has it always been the one way?

I think I would substitute it in my head for the one I thought was right/liked better and just assume the author/editor had made a mistake of some kind.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

In actual books it was always "think" until like five years ago.

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

There was a pop/rock/metal song (I mean, clearly not the last word on this stuff) from when I was a kid with the chorus being 'You've got another thing coming'.

That was pretty much my major exposure to this phrase/debate until today, which may have been where I got my fixed ideas about 'thing' as correct and right and good.

[pielology.livejournal.com]

It's been used both ways in newspapers for nearly a century (cf. 1919 cite from http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004971.html), though perhaps not equally. But "think" outnumbers "thing" in pre-1960 Google Books by a couple orders of magnitude.

Huh.

[eub.livejournal.com]

That's what I think I must have been doing, since there are enough cites of "thing" from the kinds of thing I'd have read that I must have run into it without noticing that anybody didn't use "think". That's what I find cool about this, was not *actually* aiming to have people appalled at each other's wrongness.