{"id":9129,"date":"2018-05-24T12:41:29","date_gmt":"2018-05-24T11:41:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ounews.co\/?p=9129"},"modified":"2018-05-24T12:41:29","modified_gmt":"2018-05-24T11:41:29","slug":"popularity-of-donald-plunges-as-melania-rises-how-names-accrue-social-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/education-languages-health\/popularity-of-donald-plunges-as-melania-rises-how-names-accrue-social-meaning\/","title":{"rendered":"Popularity of ‘Donald’ plunges as ‘Melania’ rises: how names accrue social meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"

While his overall approval ratings might remain surprisingly upbeat<\/a>, there\u2019s one poll in which \u201cThe Donald\u201d has seen a consistent decline.<\/p>\n

As Time<\/a> magazine announced in 2017: \u201cThe Popularity of \u2018Donald\u2019 as a Baby Name Has Hit an All-Time Low.\u201d And this downward trend has continued in 2018. According to social security data<\/a>, fewer people named their newborns \u201cDonald\u201d over the last 12 months than at any time in the past 80 years.<\/p>\n

On the upside for the Trumps, \u201cMelania\u201d, \u201cBarron\u201d and even \u201cIvanka\u201d have seen a boost<\/a> to their popularity. So has the trend to choose gun-related names<\/a>, with a growing number of babies called \u201cTrigger\u201d, \u201cShooter\u201d and \u201cMagnum\u201d.<\/p>\n

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\n
\nRead more:
\nBefore you name your baby, consider this…<\/a>
\n<\/strong>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

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What\u2019s in a name?<\/h2>\n

Names are a curious form of language. As the novelist P. G. Wodehouse wrote<\/a>: \u201cThere\u2019s some raw work pulled at the font from time to time.\u201d He was talking from personal experience, having been lumbered with the rather unwieldy \u201cPelham Grenville\u201d at birth. The trouble comes from the way that names accrue a meaning from the culture in which they\u2019re used. They have a strange relationship with our identity. A name can shape a person\u2019s personality, along with their decisions and life chances. But conversely, some people\u2019s names shape the language right back.<\/p>\n

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Racial prejudice can come simply from a name.<\/span>
\nShutterstock<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The first part of this equation works as follows. Just as your parents might choose a name which accords with their own social values, so people often judge others on the associations suggested by theirs. This is most clearly seen in the unconscious racial prejudice that can creep into job interviews.<\/p>\n

A 2004 study<\/a> by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, found that candidates with names such as Lakisha Washington and Jamal Jones were far less likely to get called to an interview than people named Emily Walsh and Greg Baker, even when all other qualifications for the job were equal. And a similar effect has been recorded in the way that pupils fare at school<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the way we judge ourselves based on our own names. \u201cNominative determinism\u201d is the idea that people are more drawn to professions which relate to, or sound like, their own names. The term was coined by the journalist John Hoyland in 1994, although the concept goes back much further than this. In his 1952 book, Synchronicity<\/a>, for example, psychologist Carl Jung wrote that there was \u201csometimes quite grotesque coincidence between a man\u2019s name and his peculiarities\u201d. He gave the example of his colleague Sigmund Freud, whose surname means \u201cjoy\u201d and who spent his career investigating phenomena such as the \u201cpleasure principle\u201d.<\/p>\n

A more recent example from the New Scientist<\/a> noted how the Royal Horticultural Society included among its staff \u201cfour Heathers, three Berrys and another three called Moss\u201d. One explanation for why this may be the case (and it should be noted that the scientific evidence for the phenomenon is mixed<\/a>) is that it\u2019s a form of \u201cimplicit egotism\u201d: people tend to unconsciously favour things they see as related to them.<\/p>\n

\n


\n
\nRead more:
\nStorm Doris: giving dangerous weather a human name makes us more wary, says research<\/a>
\n<\/strong>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

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Gordon Bennett!<\/h2>\n

Yet just as language can influence personality, so personalities can also influence our language. There are a number of examples where the names of real people have come to stand for a particular quality or behaviour in English. The word \u201cboycott\u201d, for instance, derives from the British landowner Captain Charles Boycott<\/a>, who was socially ostracised by the Irish Land League in 1880.<\/p>\n

Likewise the word \u201cquisling\u201d, referring to a traitor who collaborates with the enemy, is named after the Norwegian World War II military officer Vidkun Quisling<\/a> who operated as a Nazi collaborationist. And then there\u2019s \u201cgerrymander\u201d, coined by the Boston Gazette in 1812 when Governor Elbridge Gerry<\/a> redrew the electoral boundaries in Massachusetts to benefit his own party. As one, the redrawn districts ended up looking like a salamander, so the journalist covering the story simply blended governor and lizard together to form the new word.<\/p>\n

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James Gordon Bennett Jr \u2013 a surprising figure.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While these examples relate to the infamous actions of the people concerned, there are also instances where personality more generally has translated into everyday vocabulary. \u201cGordon Bennett<\/a>\u201d, used as an expression of shock or incredulity, is one of the most notable. The phrase derives from the real-life James Gordon Bennett Jr, an American publisher and amateur sportsman, known for his rather wild and eccentric behaviour.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not always as easy as this though to determine whether phrases are inspired by real people or not. Was Larry, of Happy as Larry<\/a> fame, an actual individual? One hypothesis is that it refers to the Australian boxer Larry Foley, who went undefeated throughout his career. And how about Riley<\/a>, who lived a life of carefree ease? The best guess here is that it refers to the hero of a 19th-century Irish folk ballad, who did indeed enjoy an admirably relaxed existence.<\/p>\n

All these cases illustrate the way that language is built from the culture in which we live. Be it the names of individual people, of communities (Spartan, vandal), or of literary characters (Scrooge, Romeo) we draw on examples from the world around us to communicate our thoughts and feelings. And the examples that prove most popular become conventionalised as part of our everyday vocabulary.<\/p>\n

\"TheAs to the influence the name Donald is likely to have on contemporary society, it\u2019s probably too early to say. But for advocates of the idea that one\u2019s name is one\u2019s destiny, it\u2019s worth noting that the Celtic origins<\/a> of \u201cDonald\u201d rather ominously mean \u201cruler of the world\u201d.<\/p>\n

Philip Seargeant<\/a>, Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics, The Open University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While his overall approval ratings might remain surprisingly upbeat, there\u2019s one poll in which \u201cThe Donald\u201d has seen a consistent decline. As Time magazine announced in 2017: \u201cThe Popularity of \u2018Donald\u2019 as a Baby Name Has Hit an All-Time Low.\u201d And this downward trend has continued in 2018. According to social security data, fewer people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":6000,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education-languages-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9129\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}