The brainchild behind

[Ben Zimmer]

On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Neal Whitman wrote:
>
> 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=

And see the discussion of "brainchild" we had in Jan. '08:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0801E&L=ADS-L&P=R10094&I=-3

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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