You’ve got another think/thing coming

@Corinna - you're definitely on the right track: it means to just beat somebody, to beat them by a narrow margin. It's often used in the idiom "to pip somebody at the post", the post being the winning post, presumably from horse-racing, where many of our idioms come from.

We also sometimes use the noun pips for the small seeds in certain fruit such as apples and orange, which I think is not so common over there.

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Yes, and when you said "HS, you seem to be just pipping me", I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what you were saying, lol! I finally decided "pipping" must be the equivalent of our "beating" or "topping" or "outdoing". Don't know if that is correct or not, but "pipping" is definitely a word you don't hear in America. The things we take for granted! ;)

Thanks so much for the tip on the blog! I'll be sure to check it out.

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@Corinna - we also use lawn and flower beds (some people think that no British garden is complete without its lawn), but I always used to wonder about the title of Joni Mitchell's The Hissing of Summer Lawns until I realised that you use sprinklers a lot over there.

A couple more from your own comment - plow (AmE), plough (BrE) - dirt (AmE), earth (BrE)

There's an excellent blog about these differences run by an American linguist living and working in Britain - http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/

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The differences between Americanisms and Britishisms is a never ending source of fascination, and one that would be worth an entire thread of its own! I frequent a site that is fairly evenly divided between Americans and Brits, and through the last several years we've had many good laughs at the confusion that can exist between the "two" languages. To add to the confusion for me, I'm a fifth-generation Texan, and we have often been accused of having our own language altogether! ;)

Here, a garden is a plot that has been plowed into rows in order to grow crops of vegetables. Sometimes you might also hear "flower garden", but most often that would be instead a "flower bed". Sometimes we use "lawn" instead of "yard" to describe an expanse of open grass; however, even though a lawn is always a yard, a yard is not always a lawn, because it may sometimes be only dirt rather than grass. But the word "garden" is never, ever used here to describe an open expanse of grass.

It's a wonder we can communicate at all! ;)

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@Corinna - I was trying to be careful not to suggest that you personally had a feeling of superiority, but I can assure you that's the impression I get when I look at sites like Apostrophe Abuse, or perhaps self-satisfied smugness would be a better description.

Yes, you're right, what you're talking about is not the Greengrocer's apostrophe, but I don't think the sin is any less venial. (I can't remember seeing any signs like this on this side of the pond). I just think that there is so much more about English that is truly fascinating than worrying about somebody else's "errors", which in the case of apostrophes are incredibly minor and make absolutely no difference to anything.

Incidentally, one strange AmE / BrE difference - what you call a yard, we call a garden. A yard for us usually has a hard surface like concrete or stones etc, like a builder's yard or a farmyard, for example. I discovered this when I wanted a picture of a back yard (in the BrE sense) for a song exercise for my students, and all I could find on Google Images were beautiful back gardens - not what I wanted at all. :)

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Geoffthing - fifty-six? - you're just a baby! No wonder you've got it wrong!

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Oh, I don't think it has anything to do with feeling "superior". Lord knows, I have errors in almost everything I write, like anyone else! :D As for the apostrophe useage, I don't think your example of the Greengrocer's apostrophe is quite the same as these yard signs, because when you see a sign that says "The Brown's", what you are reading is that this house belongs to ONE Brown. So unless you are a family of one, it would simply be incorrect.

And the rules between British English and American English---oh, my goodness, that's another huge pit to fall into! Quotation marks in different places and the like. Sometimes what one side of the pond sees as incorrect actually is not, depending on where you are.

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Correction - Like the use of "less" instead of "fewer"

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@Corinna - It all depends on how people understand "correct language". English existed for at least 1000 years before the first grammar book was published. But it always had grammar, it always had rules. Rules don't come out of a grammar book or usage guide, but from the use of the language, and they change.

All that grammar books and usage guides do is codify this, and good ones will take these changes into account. Of course we all prefer what we're used to, and few people like change in language (except perhaps for young people). Personally, I regret the passing of any sense of awe in the modern use of the word awesome, for example, but I just have to get over it; the meaning I grew up with is very much the minority meaning nowadays.

As far as punctuation is concerned, I think this got codified quite late on, and the rules seem stricter in the States. I prefer comma=short pause, semicolon=longer pause rather than a list of strict rules, for example.

The apostrophe was the last punctuation mark to arrive in English, and perhaps its use took a long time to get really settled. The so-called Greengrocer's apostrophe (as in your examples) was in fact one of the earliest uses of the apostrophe, especially with words of foreign origin where people didn't know if the final S was a plural or part of the singular noun. Like the use of "less" instead of "few", this "wrong" use of the apostrophe never causes any ambiguity (unlike a wrongly placed comma, which is said to have started a war!), and the only possible reason for criticising it is so that we can feel superior: that "we" know the "rules", and "they" don't.

Go down to any London street market, and you'll see hundreds of Greengrocer's apostrophes. But listen to the people who wrote them: you won't hear many people use English as creatively they do. So no, I might smile when I see them, but I don't want to scream. But I can't say the same for those "apostrophe abuse" hunters (and critics of "Ten items or less") that take such glee in finding other peoples "errors", while evidently thinking themselves "Oh so superior". Like the folks at the website Apostrophe Abuse, for example. :)

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Warsaw Will, you are indeed a diplomat. :) However, I can't accept the misheard version of this quote simply because its use has grown in popularity. over the past couple of decades. If I did that, I'd also have to accept other "progressions" of the language that have increased over the past several years, namely the misuse of (or complete lack of) punctuation. I know we all flub up on that fairly regularly, but it does seem that it has become a more widespread problem over the last twenty years or so. (Does anybody else want to scream when they see those decorative lawn signs proclaiming "The Green's" or "The Smith's"? Ah, but that's a story for another day. :D )

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Is this a contest to see who's the oldest? HS, you seem to be just pipping me, although I am over retirement age. As the original questioner, I have now realised that if the "thing" version is all you have heard, yes, it will make perfect sense to you (although lacking, for me personally, the preciseness of the original).

Skeeter, I think you're probably right as to how it started, and I will continue to use "think", but perhaps we oldies should now accept the "thing" version with good grace. :)

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I too am an older person, fast approaching my three score and ten.
It's always been "you have another think coming" any time I've heard it.
In fact as a kid I heard it almost daily. :-))

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I am an older person too and I've only heard the 'thing' version until very recently. I thought when I first heard it that the 'think' version was a pun on the original 'thing'.

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I'm an older person and I've only heard the 'think' version. 'Thing' is a mis-hearing.

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I see how old this thread is so I'm sorry that I'm so late in joining the debate. As a young person I naturally fall into the 'thing' side of the argument given, as many have already explained, its rise in popularity in the 80s. Although I can understand the historical logic of 'think' I do believe there is absolute sense in the se of 'thing' this word represents an undefined abstract which fits perfectly into most sentences of this phrase. I find 'think' too limiting as it is not necessarily that the person will have to mull over or reconsider their belief or opinion. Rather it could be that there will be repurcussions for having this opinion or standing, eg 'if you think buying that dress is a good idea you've got another thing coming'. Of course this 'thing' could be a 'think', a reflection on your action with regret, or this 'thing' could be more substantial; perhaps ridicule by your peers or a huge credit card bill. I can understand the value of 'think' but find 'thing' all together more useable.

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Did it ever occur to anyone one that if you say 'think' and 'coming' together, it sounds like "thing coming", because the 'c' and the 'k' blend together? I believe "you've got another think coming" is correct because, to me, it makes more sense.

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I can understand both sides. It seems that the 'think' argument has history on its side. Does this make it right? Maybe. But then rightfully 'ache' should be 'ake' and 'island' should be 'iland'. Growing up hearing 'thing', I'm ashamed to say that I never questioned it. As I understood it, the meaning fell alongside the dozens of other expressions whose literal meaning had been somewhat lost. Or maybe, as Geoffthing and Traduttore were saying, I understood 'thing' to refer to some kind of secondary reckoning. But this is how language develops. Around the time 'napron' became 'apron' were the older folks arguing that for their side on similar grounds? For me the evolution of things like this and the etymological changes that shape a language have a sort of ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny kind of relationship.

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I must admit, I found this delightful site while Googling the lyrics to check before saying "THINK*!" as a comment on a friend's post of the song. I am Canadian, mainly British schooled, only ever heard Think and would have sworn that was how the song went, too. So thank you all for being here! :D

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I'm 56 and up until last week I'd never heard the "another think" version. I thought it was a recent and clever play on words. Obviously it is not recent at all. For those struggling with the logic of "another thing" here's what I have always understood.

The expression really needs to be looked at within the context it is being used. In actual context the words "that" and "thing" refer to specific future events nearly always involving a threatening situation. Here's an example of what I mean.

"Your time's up, Jones," Smith cried, waving his gun. "On the count of three I'm gonna blow your head off. I'll be free of you bossing me around at last."

"If you think that you have another thing coming, you rotten little...."

Here "that" refers to the event or the "thing" (freedom from Jones) that Smith is thinking of / anticipating. "Freedom from Jones" in this context is the first "thing" and gives logical sense to use of "another thing". When Jones retaliates with "you have another thing coming" the meaning is that Jones will stop Smith from killing him and gaining his freedom, and that events or things are not going to work out the way Smith thought.

In other words I've always understood it to mean "If you think things are going to work out that way, you're wrong. Things are going to work out differently."

This is probably the same understanding that Bill S mentioned above.

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@Traduttore and Bill S - I'm sure you're right.It's just that for somebody of my generation brought up knowing only the think version, and having the logic of that deeply engrained in us, it's difficult to see an alternative logic. I do realise it was around before Judas Priest, but its use before then seems pretty marginal, as this graph shows:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=go...

When I asked one of my younger teacher colleagues (30-ish) about this, he told me he had never heard of the "think" version, and no doubt many people not having the "think" baggage I have, are quite able to interpret the "thing" version their own way. But for us old fogeys, its a bit more difficult.

I'm certainly not in the "right and wrong" game, but I think I'll stick with the one I'm used to.

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Let me start by saying I shall not and will not rant, even though it's in my DNA, and almost everyone reading and certainly posting on this website probably has a good old rant in them. I fall on the "think" side in this debate, and I know the probably with being open-minded is that your brains might fall out, but still, I see the "thing" side in spite of my own conviction. If you're around children at all, you hear the utter conviction with which they now say "on accident" and if you're familiar with more than one foreign language (I'm a translator) you're aware of how relative "rightness" can be: obvious to you, invisible to millions of others. But I believe in multiplicity: I believe that for every successful coinage there are several converging factors, a coincidence of supporting conditions. And I can see that for many coinages there are parallel possible paths. Just as any great work of art (say, Dante's Divine Comedy) there are hundreds of valid if not equally good translations, so for a thought might there be more than one arguable form that the language can take. Johnmgt745 says that this evolution of language is something "we could well do without." We who? We, everyone who disagrees? The people who use this language don't belong to the pool of English speakers? Hmmm.

Anyway, to quote the imperishable Ellen De Generes, my point, and I do have one, is this: I look at this division on think and thing (and by the way, kudos to Corinna for pointing out, rightly, that "a good long think" is a very standard substantive, and it certainly has an old-fashioned feel. But what about "thing"? Can't that have a deliberative value? When Brooklyn wiseguys say "let's do this thing," aren't they talking about a decision, a project, the outcome of thought? Isn't the Latin term, re publica, the ablative case of res publica, the statement of a collective thought process? Isn't the oldest parliament in the world the Icelandic Althing (which means "All Thing"), and in fact the root of deliberative democracy is as much bound up with the barbarians as the Ancient Greeks. In German, Denken is think and Ding is thing. I'm not sure the two words are cognates, but I do like the idea that Anglo-Saxon assemblies worry about concrete things and Mediterranean parliaments worry about words. (I translate from Italian and French, so construe that as no slur). But let's look at the OED (Shorter) definition of "thing". First definition, marked with one of those "obsolete" swords: "A meeting, assembly, esp. a deliberative or judicial assembly." There it is, in the deep tissues of the language, sensed as if telepathically by the young people more than the old, like a faint trans-galactic echo of a linguistic Big Bang, the original intrinsic meaning of "thing": a good, hard think. This is something I see all the time when translating, an almost oracular percolation of meaning from inside the history of the words themselves. It's one reason, I think, that having been a classicist and once an aspiring archeologist helps so much in translation. Translation, if done right, is more like brewing tea than stamping out metal parts. The swirling mist of the word's history and nuances must color the page. Not that I spend time on it: I translate fast, so I'm talking about a "blink-brew" process, but I do believe that every word contains eons and multitudes. I still think it's "another think," but the history suggests that there may be more than just a heavy metal song propelling this supposedly jejune linguistic development. Whew! If you've read this far, thanks for bearing with me. And I'm not being pollyannaish when I see that, really, I think that all of you (or both sides) are right....

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In the song in question, the use of thing is logical because the lyric does, in fact, present a first thing. "If you think I'll let it go...you got another thing coming." Instead of letting"it" go the singer is suggesting another thing it's coming. The inference is the other thing is that the singer will not let "it" go.

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This is an excellent example of the type[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHG1gM77ozc&...]Surfing Movies[/url] of evolution of language that we could well

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This is an excellent example of the type <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHG1gM77ozc&... Movies</a>of evolution of language that we could well do without

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@Warsaw Will
This is an excellent example of the type of evolution of language that we could well do without and about which I have constantly ranted.
It;s right up there with "home in" becoming "hone in", "regarding" morphing to "in regards to", and "signs" becoming "signage". (Firefox spell check at least recognises the latter as an error.)
It seems that the stock excuse for the use of these blights is "that's the way I've always heard it"!!

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@Corinna, you took the words out of my mouth - how do the 'thing' supporters explain 'another' - as you say, the whole point of another 'think 'is that the first 'think' was wrong.

@Dang - I don't want to get into a right version / wrong version argument, and it's only natural that we each prefer the one we're used to. But most authorities do seem to think that the 'think' version did indeed come first, and the Ngram graph I linked to above seems to show that the 'thing' version, although admittedly getting more popular, didn't really take off till the 1960s.

A Google Books search gives interesting results - 145,000 (think) to 36,000 (thing), and the first page of the 'think' results mainly consists of books on the English language suggesting the think version to be the original and most logical. The first entry is from Garner's Modern American Usage by Brian Garner, who I don't always agree with, but who seems to carry quite a lot of weight amongst grammar fans in the States. He says - 'It may not be funny anymore, but it makes sense: X is wrong, so eventually you're going to think Y instead.'

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=got+another+think+coming

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Dang, I understand why using "think" in this phrase sounds awkward to you and many others; it's because we don't usually consider the word "think" to be a noun. But during the time when this phrase first cropped up, "think" was indeed used as a noun, as in, "I believe what I need is a good long think." Granted, not usually the way we use it today, but that's the way it was then.

The problem is that "thinkcoming" and "thingcoming" run together and sound the same. That's why so many people misquote it. As far as it being logical with the word "thing", think of it this way: how can you have ANOTHER thing, if you haven't had a first thing? In other words, in order for "thing" to make logical sense, you'd have to say, "If you thing this, then you have ANOTHER thing coming." See the flaw in your logic?

This is what happens whenever people mishear a quote; they stretch the meaning of what they think they hear to fit. After they've said it incorrectly all their lives, of course the original phrase sounds incorrect to them.

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Corinna,

You say "Just because it's the way you've always heard it doesn't make it correct. Using "thing" in this phrase doesn't have any logic behind it at all."

But it is logical. When a person hears this phrase, the person immediately uses context, knowledge of the words thing and think, and their understanding of the purpose of the phrase, and they believe they hear the word "thing" not "think" because it makes sense to them. If "thing" wasn't logical then the mistake wouldn't have been made in the first place.

I prefer thing to think. The think version, while I understand the message, is just awkward.

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What always surprises me is that people who have always used the "you've got another thing coming" version often have no idea that "think" was used in the original (and logical) phrase. As one language expert put it: Some people might think there’s no difference between a clever turn of phrase and an ignorant mistake, but they have another think coming.

Just because it's the way you've always heard it doesn't make it correct. Using "thing" in this phrase doesn't have any logic behind it at all.

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@porsche - oops, sorry! It was my mistake. I originally had 'you've got' for both, but there was a problem with apostrophes, and I changed one but forgot to change the other. I've tried it again with 've got'. The corrected version still shows that the popularity of the thing version is relatively recent, although stronger than I had it originally, and that the increase really started around 1982.
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ve...

@Bubbha - OK, but it's a bit vague for me. Let me explain how I've always understood the think version - If that's what you think/thought, you've got another think coming

The speaker thinks that the other person is wrong, and that sooner or later they will realise they are wrong and have to rethink their position, in other words have another think about it - hence they've got another think coming. So for me, the second think isn't simply a play on words, it's the whole point. And I feel that this is completely lost in the thing version. For me it's not simply that some vague thing is on the way, it's that the person will have to change their thinking on this particular matter. Hence the strength of the idiom.

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The logic of "You got another thing coming" is clear in its meaning: something else (unexpected or unwanted) is on its way.

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Will, you compared "got another think..." with "YOU got another thing...". You should make the comparison fairer by taking out the "you" in the second version. "Think" still outnumbers "thing", but the recent growth of "thing" will be more apparent.

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http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=go... - Notice that the rise starts in 1982, the year of Judas Priest's song - 'Another thing coming'

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No, sorry Bubbha, it's the other way round. The earliest known occurrence in the US of the thing version was in 1919, and of the think version in 1898.

http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/thing.html
http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxyouhav....
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/article...
http://grammartips.homestead.com/anotherthink.html

But in any case, you haven't answered my question - where is the possible logic of the thing version.

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The phrase "If that’s what you think, you’ve got another think coming" is a play on words that incorporates the older term "You've got another thing coming," changing "thing" to "think" for humorous and meaningful effect.

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