Following on from the hyperbole thread...

[muddleduck]

That was about words that we had only read and not heard.
What about words we have spelled wrong because we have only ever heard them and not seen them written down.

I can offer "another thing coming" instead of "another think coming".

huggly: I see what you're saying. For me it means "you believed Thing A was going to happen, but aha, mark my words, you will discover Thing B is going to happen instead." The "another" contrasts the expected event with the reality.

Sorry. I didn't mean to spark off another think/thing debate.

I think (thing?) this is a great example of our ability to impose meaningful structure on speech even when it actually makes little sense. We twist or extend our idea of what a word or phrase means to allow it to fit the context. As always with language it is the errors that reveal the processes that go on all the time without us noticing.

SIL thought

"Who built the ark? No-one! No-one!
Who built the ark? Brother, no-one built the ark!"

Quite perceptive for a child actually, I thought.

Slightly different on the think / thing debate - people often mispronounce anything; something; nothing as anythink; somethink and nothink so I assumed people who said "another think coming" were making the same mistake

Oh and I used to use an n in dilemma; and spell definite as definate

I get confused between discrete/ discreet.

Also complementary/ complimentary and practice/practise.

I was a journalist for years and was always getting by ear chewed by grumpy subs, but I still have trouble with these.

(and it's another thing coming, think is awful)

The only way I can remember the discrete/discreet thing is:

discrete is like concrete - as in a lump of concrete, something separate from everything else;

discreet is like creep - as in tiptoeing around and being careful about what I say.

But to go a little off-topic: there's one reading problem I have, where I have to stop and disentangle myself:

"I know that..."
"I now do..

is perfectly ok, but when I read "I know now.." or "I now know.." I stumble over which pronunciation is which.

I'm sure it's 'think', the context I've usually heard it in is 'if that's what you think, then you've got another think coming!', i.e. you're wrong and I'm going to put you right.

It makes no sense grammatically of course, but then these sayings often don't...

I've never heard this expression with thing or think.

until a couple of years ago, DD1 thought that there was a country called Orientah (as in We Three Kings of....) .

Couple of others (learning songs phonetically at schools) - the little ord cheese was asleep on the hay according to DD2, and DD3's favourite Christmas song was the dolphin one. I racked my brains tryign to work out where dolphins coudl possibly come into the Christmas story, till she started singing "Rudolphin Red Nosed Reindeer".

I thought it was another thing coming.

My 96 year old grandma when on honeymoon in the 50s commented that the view was very picture-skew, she'd only ever seen picturesque written down.

It's think

UQD is wrong about "thing/think", but I do admire him for at least having read all the debates, understood them, and considered all the supporting evidence for 'think" (like the OED!) and still sticking to "thing" because it makes sense to him. At least he's done the research, even if he thinks the research has been retconned (even the OED?).

Better than you others who blindly persist in your mis-hearing.