I blame Judas Priest. It’s hard to compete with the eight minutes of metal mayhem that is their anthem You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’. Yes, “Thing” (sic). But if you think I’m going to give in, you’ve got another think coming. I’m choosing my words carefully: another think coming. Think. Not thing.
All this seemed uncontroversial until I tweeted the following simple extract from the Guardian style guide:
If you think the expression is “you’ve got another thing coming”, then you have misheard the expression “you’ve got another think coming”.
The reaction resembled the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and – from some, but by no means all, of @guardianstyle’s 53,000 followers – acceptance. In fact some people did not get beyond the first stage, refusing to accept that there could be any possible alternative to “another thing coming”. I’ve not witnessed such polarised opinion on an arcane linguistic issue since the debate over “all mouth and (no) trousers”.
The OED defines the phrase “to have another think coming”, a little flatly, as “to be greatly mistaken”. It only works in tandem with the phrase “if he thinks that ...” or similar. The earliest example the OED gives is from an American newspaper, the Syracuse Standard, in 1898:
“Conroy lives in Troy and thinks he is a coming fighter. This gentleman has another think coming.”
More recently, it quotes this example from the Independent in 2002:
“If he thinks he will be blissfully free of directives and paperwork, he has another think coming.”
You can see how it works:
1 You think something.
2 You are wrong, or someone thinks you are.
3 You have another think coming.
I know language isn’t always logical: if it were, “let’s see if we can get this show on the road” would not mean exactly the same as “let’s see if we can’t get this show on the road”. But surely to think something, and then think again, is the only interpretation of “to have another think coming” that makes any sense – it’s roughly equivalent to having second thoughts about something. To think something and then “have another thing coming”, by contrast, makes no sense at all other than as a mishearing of “think” as “thing”.
The OED agrees with me about this, saying of “to have another thing coming”: “arising from misapprehension of ‘to have another think coming’.” Of the examples quoted my favourite is from Del Boy in a 1999 episode of Only Fools and Horses: “If you think I’m staying in a lead-lined Nissen hut with you and Grandad and a chemical bloody khazi you’ve got another thing coming.”
The Grammarist blog agrees that “another think coming” was the original expression, arising in the US, but says “another thing coming” is now more common; more contentiously, it argues that this version of the phrase “usually makes literal sense”, which I don’t get at all. I do agree with this comment below the line: “‘Another think coming’ seems a rather jocular, witty way to say someone is mistaken. ‘Another thing coming’ usually suggests to me that the author desires the ‘other thing’ coming to be a fist in an idiot’s face.”
So even if I’m outnumbered, I am sticking with “think”. But whichever version you prefer – and in spoken English they sound much the same – the phrase has, in the century or so of its existence, lent itself to some colourful and evocative language:
“If you think just because we are at war I’m going to give my brains an opiate or send them away on a vacation, you got another think a comin’. I wasn’t built that way.“ (Jacob Marvin Rudy, 1918)
“He had another think a-coming, that begrimed whoremonger!” (James Purdy, 1984).
And of course:
“If you think I’ll sit around as the world goes by
You’re thinkin’ like a fool ‘cause it’s a case of do or die.
Out there is a fortune waitin’ to be had
If you think I’ll let it go you’re mad
You’ve got another thing comin’.” (Judas Priest, 1982)
