That's all well and good, but if you want a really controversial issue, then try this - do you say, "you've got another thing coming" or "you've got another think coming?

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If it comes after "If you think that X, then..." then the latter is the only one that actually makes sense by repeating part of the original sentence.

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That's what I would think, but we've both got another. . .

It really is an amusing issue - because of the phonetic similarity of the two phrases, apparently, many people have been assuming that their family members agreed with them for years, only to discover when asked that, in fact, there was major disagreement. Including me - my father and I both always thought "think," but greebsnarf and our mother apparently were "thing" people.

Also funny, according to someone's comment at the link above, is that the OED explicitly claims that "thing" is a variant of "think," but apparently gives an earliest citation for the former that predates the earliest citation for the latter by a couple of decades. . . .

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NO NO NO NO OMG YOU ARE SO WRONG I WILL KILL YOU

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thing. no question. i'm not even sure how to interpret it. does it mean "you've got to rethink that"?

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But but but -- "thing" has no reason for being there. Why should a reevaluation of one's previous opinion be "another thing"? Is one's opinion or assessment of a situation a "thing"? That's a very awkward usage if it's true.

"You've got another think coming" is ungrammatical, but it's one of those purposely ungrammatical usages of an unmodified verb form for parallelism, because "thought" is an imperfect nominalization of "think" here -- it's referring to the entire process of "thinking X about Y" or forming an opinion about it, and "you've got another thought coming" sounds like an entirely separate thought about an entirely separate thing.

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I usually think of the "thing" as "someone else's fist," ie,

"You may think x, but you've got another thing coming [since I find your opinion so distasteful that I will punch your face in because of it]."

I think of it as being spoken by burly mafiosi.

But even if [unlikely as the event may be] my interpretation is incorrect, there's no reason why a reevaluation of one's previous opinion shouldn't be a thing. "Thing" is a pretty abstract noun, after all, and I think it's just as likely that "thing" became "think" when enough people noticed the cutesy parallelism as the other way around.

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i don't use it at all. i think i first heard it as ‘another thing’, but quickly reanalyzed it as ‘another think’ (in any case, that's what i now take it to mean).

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My own pet peeve is "if worst comes to worst", because it's so *obviously* a mere phonetic corruption of "if worse comes to worst"; the latter's meaning is completely transparent, while the former is the sort of thing that's pretty hard to justify when you actually try to parse it.

I feel the same way about "you've got another thing coming" -- I'm convinced it's a construction that developed because "think" sounds *weird* (because ungrammatical) and "thing" sounds better, so that the idiom becomes more euphonous at the same time that it loses its original meaning.

Same deal with "I could care less"; it's obviously just a corruption -- because shorter -- of "I *couldn't* care less", which does, indeed, coexist with it and which does make sense -- but by dropping an extra syllable we reverse the semantic meaning and make the idiom opaque.

I'm not that much of a prescriptivist, I swear, but I do like to sort of believe that it should be possible to map sentences onto logical meanings, sometimes.

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That kind of activity on the part of usage pedants is exactly the kind of thing that always caused me pain when dealing with formal logicians as a group.

The existence of you and your unashamed correct reasoning is good.

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in all fairness, linguists perpetrate a lot of slanders against logicians (for example, they frequently seem that we think the predicate logic versions of various constructions are accurate and complete analyses of the corresponding constructions in English, when, in fact, we mainly think that they capture a few key aspects of the semantics of those constructions as they are used in the writing of mathematical proofs, which we're all pretty sure is not representative of English usage in general).

i should also point out that this is the kind of pedantry i'm pretty sympathetic to in general, as it's perfectly fair play to complain about cases where people are clearly trying to use something in he technical way and failing (see carnap's example from quantum mechanics, or think about how you'd feel if somebody misused a specialized piece of terminology from linguistics). however, the syntactic differences in this case seem like they show that's not the whole story here.

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I actually first encountered the phrase "begs the question" in my CTY logic class, and I would only ever produce the logicians' use; the other always sounds a bit funny to me. But you are, of course, entirely correct. The idea that it's a "misuse" - as if someone said "Heisenburg's uncertainty principle" when they meant to refer to the fact that a quantum object can be in a linear superposition of basis states and which of them it will be measured in will be random (a Harvard lawprof actually did this when referring to the state of a certain rule in contract law, and it's a pretty good metaphor except she got the name wrong) - is just silly.

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i also think i first encountered it at CTY, and found the vulgar usage weird the first couple times i encountered it, but it grew on me quickly. i think part of the reason for this may be that ‘raises the question: Q’ isn't something i say - my best alternative was ‘raises the question of whether Q’, which is substantially more of a mouthful than ‘begs the question: Q’.

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Right, and "raises the question" is much weaker than the way "begs the question" is usually used -- something can be a very legitimate statement and still raise questions, while if something *begs* a question (in the clunky way "beg" is interpreted here) it means that the following question absolutely *must* be asked because if it isn't we're letting slide a completely unjustified assertion. The vulgar usage of "begs the question" almost always is used in the same *sense* as the formal usage -- to say that someone is arguing irresponsibly by blatantly making a question far simpler than it really is and therefore not engaging the real point of contention.

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Down with prescriptive language! (except where semantic clarity is involved).

OK, battle cry severely weakened by second half.

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I was actually confused about the difference between the two usages because, in fact, the two usages *overlap* to a significant degree, since when one begs the question in the proper sense it's often because one has only restated the argument in such a way that it looks like the question has been answered, but it can easily be revealed that one is question-begging by asking another, more carefully worded question.

For example, saying that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God because it is divinely inspired is both begging the original question (amounts to a mere reassertion of the argument) *and* "begs the question" (implies the immediately related question) "How do you know it's divinely inspired?"

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I actually screwed up who/ whom recently *because of a false analogy to Latin.* (That is, I used 'whom' in a situation in which English would naturally use the subject, but Latin the accusative . . .)

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