Finally, according to those from the Durkheimian tradition, these perceived relations among things are ultimately determined by the relations among people. In The Fine Line , Eviatar Zerubavel develops how language allows us to detach mental entities from their surroundings and to assign them fixed, decontextualized meanings. Such detachments, the deriving of categories of things, involves making discreteness out of continuums. Among the consequences of such semantic parsings of the world are seeing greater similarities among elements within a category of things than may, in fact, be the case, and seeing greater differences between elements within different categories. Different social groups emerge with different languages, which allow members to distinguish who is in their group and who is not.
Labels have a tendency to become self-fulling prophecies.
People tend to conform to the labels others apply to them, which is referred to as the Pygmalion Effect . Consider the importance of prior information that you have about individuals before first interacting with them. And when individuals do make such onomastic assumptions they can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. Parents spend hours debating names for babies-believing, perhaps correctly, that to name something is to shape its destiny. The enterprise is not new.