{"id":12679,"date":"2016-08-03T17:45:11","date_gmt":"2016-08-03T16:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=12679"},"modified":"2016-08-03T17:45:11","modified_gmt":"2016-08-03T16:45:11","slug":"are-you-a-phenom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=12679","title":{"rendered":"Are you a phenom?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I came across an interesting word in an <a href=\"http:\/\/healthland.time.com\/2012\/01\/30\/are-you-a-hyperpolyglot-the-secrets-of-language-superlearners\/\">article about hyperpolyglots<\/a> I read today (it&#8217;s an old article, but I only just found it) &#8211; <strong>phenoms<\/strong>, which appears in the following sentence:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>TIME spoke to Erard about <strong>phenoms<\/strong> who can speak more languages than they have fingers, whether anyone can do it and where the upper limits of human potential lie.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>According to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dictionary.com\/browse\/phenom\">Dictionary.com<\/a>, phenom [f\u026a\u02c8n\u0252m] is an abbreviation of phenomenon and refers especially to a young prodigy. The definitions are &#8220;a person or thing of outstanding abilities or qualities&#8221; (informal), or &#8220;A phenomenally skilled or impressive person; a performing wonder, esp in sports&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Apparently it comes from US baseball slang, and was first recorded in 1890.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.merriam-webster.com\/dictionary\/phenom\">Merriam-Webster<\/a> defines a phenom as &#8220;a person who is very good at doing something (such as a sport)&#8221; or &#8220;a person of phenomenal ability or promise&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Have you come across this word before?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I came across an interesting word in an article about hyperpolyglots I read today (it&#8217;s an old article, but I only just found it) &#8211; phenoms, which appears in the following sentence: TIME spoke to Erard about phenoms who can speak more languages than they have fingers, whether anyone can do it and where the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10,13,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language","category-language-learning","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12679\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}