Mind your language
A SPOKESMAN for Marks & Spencer's said on the wireless the other day that the company was no longer 'UK-centric'. Really!
What he meant was that Marks & Sparks was going to buy goods from abroad because they were cheaper. But
anything with -centric tacked on the end is automatically pejorative. We are not
meant to be ethnocentric, because the ethnographers think they believe that any culture in the world is as good as any other. In fact, they don't believe that, thank heavens, when it comes to suttee or female circumcision.
The New Oxford Dictionary of English (the Node) mentions Eurocentric as an
illustration of the main specialised usage of the suffix: 'forming an opinion or evaluation originating from a speci- fied viewpoint'. That is not, though, what the man from M&S was talking about, even if on the surface he was using the jargon of cultural relativism. After all, the outlets of the retail chain are still mainly in Britain, even if poor folk from tropical climes run up pairs of jeans cheaper.
Surprisingly, centric as an adjective has been kicking about since the 16th century in English. Marlowe, in Doctor Faustus, has 'the substance of this cen- tric earth', a pleasantly pre-Copernican
view of our place in the cosmos. But putting the earth at the centre was not necessarily an anthropocentric cosmol- ogy, for the kingdom of Satan was tra- ditionally situated inside the earth, even more centrically. Indeed, the mediaeval viewpoint was metaphorically theocen- tric, for, though the heavens were on the outside of the sidereal spheres, it was, in the Dantean map of things, the love of God encircling all that made the world of creation go round.
In that pre-Copernican astronomy eccentrics were not dotty professors but
apparent motions of celestial bodies that did not describe a neat circle round the earth. Galileo took up Copernicus's scheme, and for him eccentrics were bodies that did not revolve neatly round the sun. He was heliocentric instead of geocentric.
Tycho Brahe was a bit of both, having planets revolving round the sun, and the sun round the earth, tracing imagi- nary spiralling curlicues with its orbiting followers.
And in our day the company that puts gas pipes underground from coast
to coast is called Centrica. I wonder if its spokesman thinks it is UK-centric. More likely it is a meaningless bundle of morphemes, like Encarta.
Dot Wordsworth
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