@Chris B - You didn't come across as an apostrophe snob - I took it as an observation, not a complaint. I'm happy you're coming round to the idea of 'think', although I realise that for many people, 'thing' will remain the version they know and love, and that's fine.

@jayles
d) adjective -plants often eventually wither of their accord; they don't need an agent. You are describing the state of the plant
e) passive - the sirocco is the agent - OK, that's an event
h) agreed - shrunken can only be an adjective
- but you could perhaps do the same as with your other example - the plants had been shrunk by the lack of water (I'm not sure about the biology, though)

i) I was bored - by itself an adjective (a state - I'm in a bored state) - the play was boring; I was bored
I was bored with his incessant chatter - adjective

But - 'But I am bored by this jostling unreasonable world' - HG Wells - passive, and as we could put it into the active - 'This jostling unreasonable world bored me', it's presumably an event (these aren't really terms I use in this context)

'they are bored by the thought of saving up for their children' - DH Lawrence - again we could change it into an active (for me the test) - 'The thought of saving up for their children bores them'

And another lovely one from HG Wells - 'They are bored by his face, bored by his automobile, bored by his knighthood, bored by his country house and his snob of a wife'

(I'm not really erudite, I just looked up 'bored by' in Google Books)

But the difference between past participle adjectives and passives is an interesting question, and I've seen examples where anti-passive teachers in college English departments have (wrongly) marked sentences like 'I was interested in your idea' as passive, when it is no such thing.

I've written about these sort of misunderstandings on my blog - http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2011/11/on-misidentifying-passive-and-passive.html

@JJMBallantyne - good to see you back.

@Chris B - I assume your own was deliberate! Unlike errant commas, which can change the meaning (and one was rumoured to have started a war), errant apostrophes are pretty harmless. In fact, showing the plurals of certain words was one of the earliest uses of the apostrophe. This from the Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language:

'There was formerly a respectable tradition (17c - 19c) of using the apostrophe for noun plurals, especially in loanwords ending in a vowel (as in We doe confess Errata's, Leonard Lichfield, 1641, and Comma's are used, Phillip Luckcombe, 1771)'

And Dr Johnson quotes Pope (without comment) - 'Comma’s and points they set exactly right.' from Pope's Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot 1735, (checkable at Google Books).

Obviously a traditional bunch, market traders. Just think of it as a little local colour.

Sorry to rub it in for American readers, and of course Britain is very grateful for all the help you gave us, but a common description for American soldiers among their British counterparts was 'Overpaid, oversexed and over here'.

Or as the somewhat bigoted Steptoe puts it in this (very old) clip from the comedy series 'Steptoe and Son' - 'Coming over here in 1917, splashing it about and having all our women' - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s57RjAY59uU. This episode plays on those two great British pastimes, knocking the Americans and knocking the French.

@I'm late - sorry, you lost a bit of your name in the last one.

As I'm British, just out of interest, and not trying to prove anything, I had a look at the graph for British books, where the difference is rather more marked - http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=got+another+think+coming%2Cgot+another+thing+coming&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share= , and at the British National Corpus, where there are ten examples of 'think' and none of 'thing' - http://bnc.bl.uk/saraWeb.php?qy=got+another+think+coming&mysubmit=Go

But I have to admit that on the Internet, 'thing' is way ahead - http://www.netspeak.org/#query=got+another+%253F+coming.

@I'm - of course, they're both idioms, so I don't think the verb / noun thing is that important, really. Anyway, as I said before, I'm fine with people saying 'thing', although personally I think they're losing something.

That Ngram graph even suggests that the popularity of the 'thing' version has levelled out a bit, and the 'think' version is recovering a little - I would like to think as a result of the younger (Judas Priest - younger?) generation discovering the roots of the idiom. But certainly, custom rules, and I imagine the two will coexist happily for years to come.

@I'm late - Doesn't exactly look as though it's dying out to me - http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=got+another+think+coming%2Cgot+another+thing+coming&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

@I'm late - "The old version ... uses a word which has been phased out of the language in that form" - I'll have to have a think about that.

Well, you learn something new every day; what a fascinating insight this is. I'm almost tempted to look just to see about the buttered wife - sounds like something from 'Last Tango in Paris'.