{"id":21359,"date":"2017-05-03T09:14:46","date_gmt":"2017-05-03T08:14:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=21359"},"modified":"2017-05-03T09:14:46","modified_gmt":"2017-05-03T08:14:46","slug":"ever-heard-of-the-notion-of-nominative-determinism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=21359","title":{"rendered":"Ever heard of the notion of nominative determinism?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nominative determinism is the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names.<\/p>\n<p>The term was first used in the magazine &#8220;New Scientist&#8221; in 1994, after the magazine&#8217;s humorous Feedback column noted several studies carried out by researchers with remarkably fitting surnames. These included a book on polar explorations by Daniel Snowman and an article on urology by researchers named Splatt and Weedon.<\/p>\n<p>You can read more about the idea <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nominative_determinism\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>What on earth has led me to think about this notion now? Well. a few days ago, I watched a play called &#8220;The Philanthropist&#8221; in which a character who was a philologist was called Phil and another character who was an academic was called Don.<\/p>\n<p>My sister &#8211; something of an expert on language &#8211; told me about the concept of nominative determinism which was new to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nominative determinism is the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names. The term was first used in the magazine &#8220;New Scientist&#8221; in 1994, after the magazine&#8217;s humorous Feedback column noted several studies carried out by researchers with remarkably fitting surnames. These included a book on polar explorations by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21359"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21363,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21359\/revisions\/21363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}