Sounding Smart

It's not all bad, I suppose. Everyone wants to be liked and included. Or, as my grad school mentor, Jim Davies says, to be a part. And everyone wants to be looked up to and admired as having a little something extra. Or, as Davies says, to be apart. So we say the quirky little things that our linguistic tribe says, the tribe to which we belong or the tribe to which we aspire.

But even so, there's a right way and a wrong way. I'm thinking of the suffix -centric. The practice of using -centered, on the one hand and -centric on the other was so routine that it never occurred to me to formulate a rule about it. You said "human-centered" if that was the expression that fit best and anthropocentric if that worked best.

If there were a rule--and there probably is--it would be that if you want to use -centric, use the Greek or Latin root from which the English word is derived and slap the suffix onto it. If you want to use -centered, use the current English form. So you might talk about an Anglocentric alliance, for example or an English-centered alliance. You would never, ever, under any circumstances, refer to an English-centric alliance. If that language is a way of aspiring to a tribe defined by careful language use, I can guarantee you that it won't work very well.

My guess is that -centric sounds smart. And you know what it means. So you just slap it on. For now, I think any reader who is used to careful use of language just rolls his eyes when, in the middle of a column about the psychiatric world view, the word "penis-centric" shows up. My concern is that if people keep doing it, it will be accepted as appropriate and the mixture of language traditions in English will proceed apace.

It will become a fait accomplished. My advice--unsought, as usual--is, if you don't know the root, just say it in English.