The brainchild behind

Mon May 6 16:20:56 UTC 2013

Searching for the phrase "brainchild who" yields a set of matches that
includes some examples with the apparent meaning "mastermind" or
simply "smart person". (Some matches fit the traditional meaning.)
Here are some raw matches:

The Werewolves Put The Bite Back In Rock .
Madison Courier - May 8, 1979
Their producer and manager is none other than Andrew Loog Oldham. the
brainchild who helped bring the Stones themselves to fame. we're aways
being ...

The housewife handyperson - Page 88
books.google.com/books?isbn=0830678808
Jacquelyn Peake - 1978 - Snippet view - More editions
I heard of one brainchild who saves her empty fingernail polish
bottles, cleans them, and fills them with leftover paint. She does
this in addition to the jar bit. The beauty of this is the little
built-in brush which is perfect for touching up tiny ...

Waltrip, Wilson, Hendrick .
Herald-Journal - Jan 22, 1987
And the brainchild who put this formidable team together? His name is
Rick Hendrick. He now owns three teams, the other two being Geoff
Bodine and Tim ...

The Buffalo News: A BAD IDEA
$2.95 -
Buffalo News - Jul 6, 1997
Who's the brainchild who came up with that idea? Ted Nolan: Good for
you for rejecting this ludicrous offer. What a slap in the face for
all you've done to ...

JL mentioned that HDAS has an example in 1969. Here is the entry:

[Begin excerpt]
Brainchild n. a very intelligent person.
1969 Rev. J. Jackson, on Mike Douglas show (CBS-TV) (Feb 11): Let's
face it. Lester Maddox is no brainchild.
[End excerpt]

Garson

On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 10:20 AM, Ben Zimmer
<bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: The brainchild behind
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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/
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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