The brainchild behind

[Jonathan Lighter]

HDAS has _brainchild_  'very intelligent person' from 1969, but there's
only one ex.

JL


On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Neal Whitman <nwhitman at ameritech.net> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Neal Whitman <nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET>
> Subject:      The brainchild behind
>
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>
> 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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