The brainchild behind

[Neal Whitman]

On NPR this morning, a story about the dismal run of a Spice Girls in London said that the show's creator was also "the brainchild behind" the musical Mamma Mia.

A Google search for "the brainchild behind" brings up a number of hits I can't determine on my phone screen, but I notice that the first one is from Brian's Usage Errors, explaining that some people misuse "brainchild" in this way. In any case, it was new to me.

Checking with Google Ngrams, I see that "brainchild behind" is on the rise, but still very rare compared to "brainchild of". I had to magnify the results 50x before it appeared as something other than a flat line: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=brainchild+of%2Cbrainchild+behind+*50&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

Neal

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