It’s Your Thing

Dear Dr. Ink,

I enjoyed your explanation about the proper use of the term “begs the question.” Turns out I’ve been misusing it, too, and as a 20-year reporter I should know better.

Indulge me a moment, then, and please settle a long-simmering debate among reporters and editors: When I tell them if they think I’m filing 10 stories this deadline cycle they’ve got “another think coming,” they tell me what I’ve got is “another thing coming.”

“Think” or “thing”? Please put these confused colleagues out of my misery.

Wm. Hoffman
Dallas Business Journal

Answer: Dr. Ink had never heard of this argument before, and assumed that the correct phrase was “another thing coming.” So he did what any respectable online wiseguy would do: he Googled the phrase.

He learned that the grammatically challenged group Judas Priest preferred “another thing coming.” That led Doc to a website in which Paul Brians lists “Common Errors in English Usage.”

Brians argues that “the original expression is the last part of a deliberately ungrammatical joke: ‘If that’s what you think, you’ve got another think coming.'” In other words, the jokester took the verb form of “think “and turned it into a noun.

So how did it evolve into “You’ve got another thing coming”? Brians concludes: “Here’s a case in which eagerness to avoid error leads to error.”

As for the soulful Doc, he refers readers to this Stax/Volt R&B wisdom: “It’s your thing. Do what you wanna do. I can’t tell you who to sock it to.”