Brainchild

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Feb 1, 2008 12:54 PM, Jim Parish <jparish at siue.edu> wrote:
>
> Wilson Gray wrote:
> > "Mastermind" a _synonym_ of *any* kind of "brainchild"?! Aaarrgghhh!!!
> > No! Please! Stop the pain!
>
> For whatever it's worth, Marvel Comics once featured a character called
> "Brain-Child", a young boy with superhuman intellect and psionic
> powers. (He was a one-shot; Marvel also has (had?) a longrunning
> character called "Mastermind", a powerful illusionist.)
>
> Not directly relevant to the discussion, perhaps, but I think it illustrates
> the naturality of this interpretation of "brainchild".

The new interpretration is also helped along by the obsolescence of
the old figurative sense of "child" meaning 'that which originates
from something else' (OED sense 14, as in Shakespeare's "dreams, which
are the children of an idle brain"). So that allows for semantic
ambiguity, somewhat akin to "boy toy" being read as either 'toy of a
boy' or 'boy who is a toy'.


--Ben Zimmer

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