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Jonathon GREEN's avatar

And the Genny Lex is coming up.

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Benjamin Dreyer's avatar

In the immortal words of Prince Chulalongkorn, at least in the King and I version: I DO NOT BELIEVE!

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Jonathon GREEN's avatar

Not for nothing have I left the country. (I believe 'Lex' just edged out 'Lec'. But, to use that excellent Myles-ism, 'Matteradamn’.)

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Steven K. Homer's avatar

Definitely a "thing coming" person here who also definitely encountered "think coming" people only recently. [insert GIF of star-belly sneetches here]

I suspect, if I had to forensically reconstruct my path to this lifestyle, it is the challenge of the K-C collision combined with hearing it without the context of "if that's what you think." I always understood it as more of a threat: you won't get away with it, Buster, because unpleasant consequences await if you pursue the course of action you are contemplating.

(Judas Priest, about whom I know very little outside of the fact that their lead singer has a "Personal Life" link on his Wikipedia page, uses "thing coming" in the vague threat sense but in the context of thinking: "If you think I'll let it go, you're mad/You've got another thing comin.'" So they're no help at all.)

Since I'm rambling anyway, I want to say that I *love* the footnotes almost as much as the main text. They're like the after-party of your posts.

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Benjamin Dreyer's avatar

Thank you, thank you, Steven, for all appreciation and praise. I appreciate your appreciation! Someone mentioned the other day, as I was warming up for this essay over t'Bluesky, that the thing version has an almost karmic feeling about it.

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Robert Arbuckle's avatar

"Have a think" reminds me of Freddie inviting George to "come and have a bathe," so of course I like it.

As for the Jubilee, at the time the regrettable slang for it reminded me of my all-time favorite Aussie-ism, as related by dear Dame Edna: ladies referring to having undergone a delicate operation as having had their "hizzie at the hozzie."

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Benjamin Dreyer's avatar

A, of course!

B, yikes!

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Peter Bornstein's avatar

As Shawn Spencer, from one of my favorite guilty pleasure TV shows, “Psych” says, “I’ve heard it both ways.” https://youtu.be/JE1fzk-4TJk?si=iFl_m1bTP1gwkX3-

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Georgina's avatar

Platty joobs, surely not. I am from the UK, have lived in France for 40 years and never heard that phrase before. It's awful, what can I say?

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SMC❤️SF's avatar

Oh dear. I just can’t stand it! My Saturday morning now fraught with allowing what I always considered unsophisticated or uneducated word usage about what I had coming. I envision the memory of my mother now sternly pointing her finger at me, “Well you’ve got another …..”

Reading all these comments and yours too has got me thinking but I can’t change now. My mother would think that if I were to have another “thing” coming it would certainly lack the needed emphasis.

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Justin Myers's avatar

I grew up with ‘another thing coming’ – in fact many things coming – and once I learned that the much uglier somehow ‘think’ was the supposedly right way, I cut the phrase out of my life altogether.

I use ‘nauseated’ and someone always raises an eyebrow – a doctor once even stealth-corrected it to ‘nauseous’ when reading back my symptoms – so you can’t win, really.

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Benjamin Dreyer's avatar

Indeed you can’t!

(By the way, my respectful trick when someone utters or writes a word in my presence and I think they’ve misused it is to respond by avoiding both their usage and my own preferred one. Which can be, as respectful tricks go, incredibly tricky.)

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Justin Myers's avatar

Haha, yes, I do the same. Let someone else educate them and be forever remembered as an a-hole

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Francine McKenna's avatar

Every once in a while I punctuate something I’ve written with “many thinkle peep so”, as my Glasgow-born dad would say. Well-meaning pedants will write to tell me I’ve made a typo.

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Laurie Fusco's avatar

This is delightful .

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Benjamin Dreyer's avatar

Thank you, Laurie!

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Steve Kempson's avatar

Team Think over here.

A wise person once informed me that words with a 'k' in them were somehow inherently funny, and anything that helps counter the daily weltschmerz is AOK with me.

Or perhaps that was only words beginning with 'k'?

Oh dear, kockup alert!

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Benjamin Dreyer's avatar

The wise person may well have been Neil Simon, who gives a full tutorial on the funniness of words with k’s in them in The Sunshine Boys. (Though presumably he didn’t land on his theory out of thin air.)

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Steve Kempson's avatar

It may well have been, now you mention it.

I'll need to check whether or not he's one of the people I follow on Bluesky.

Perhaps his wisdom was received at one remove.

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Kate Morgan Reade's avatar

As my daughter would say, "Totes adorbs!" All of it! I remain laughing in my soup, which makes zero sense; ergo, my glee at everything you just wrote—the footnotes in particular. I remain, once again, relieved that my internal convos are not diagnostically significant indicators of (at least extant) mental disorders.

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Judy Johnson's avatar

It's been a trying work day, as in, I'm trying to get things down on paper and either have or have given up, so this post's humor was most welcome. Thank you for writing!

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Benjamin Dreyer's avatar

Thank you for coming by to read, Judy, and I hope that the day either improves or simply calls itself a day.

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Louis Kersten's avatar

Evey time I hear or see "spag bol", I think of "Technicolor yawn." Then again, the Brits butcher the word pasta, so maybe it's a macaroni thing.

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Judy Johnson's avatar

How kind of you to offer that hope.

Three small projects knocked out, one large one worked on a little, so

nothing too scary. And I'm close to calling it a day.

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Caroline O’Connell's avatar

My English teacher mother often suggested, depending on the admonished behavior, that I might indeed have another THINK coming.

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Lisa Kohn's avatar

That post almost managed to cure me of my use of footnotes, something that 48 years of legal writing had failed to do. Either that, or it reinforced my practice. I can't tell; I am laughing too hard.

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