The brainchild behind

[Laurence Horn]

On May 6, 2013, at 2:27 PM, ADSGarson O'Toole wrote:

>> On May 6, 2013, at 10:20 AM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>>
>>> 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
>>>
>> My only emendation to that discussion is that I'd nominate "brains (behind)"
>> as the causal link rather than "brain" or "mastermind" (even though the
>> semantics would be basically the same).  Of course you can also have
>> "the brains of the operation", but "the brains behind the operation" is
>> not uncommon either.
>
> It appears that the modifier "child" is being ignored. Why?
>
> Hypothesis: "brainchild" is re-interpreted as "brainy child". A
> semantic nexus for "prodigy" already exists for many people. One
> definition for prodigy is: A person, especially. a young one, endowed
> with exceptional abilities. The term "brainy child" intersects with
> this nexus, and so the user of the term "brainchild" decides it can be
> applied to adults and children.
>
I'm not sure I can get it to work that way.  The "brainchild behind" an operation, a play, etc. doesn't have anything obvious to do with prodigies, child or otherwise.  It seems to me more likely that we have a blend of "X is the (metaphorical) brainchild of Y" and "Y is the brains behind X".  If there's a child around, it's the operation, play, etc., that emerges fully-formed Athena-style from the brains of Y, not Y him/herself.

LH

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