This is an All Ears English podcast, episode 2144.
Are you overusing this compound adjective?
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Back in 2013, there was one compound adjective in English that people were overusing all of the time.
Find out what it was and whether we're still hooked on this word today.
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Hey, Aubrey, how's everything going today?
I'm great.
How are you, Lindsay?
Good.
I'm excited to be on the mic.
I'm having a good day.
All good.
So Aubrey, would you say that here at All Ears English, we are audience centric.
Here at All Ears English.
Absolutely.
Yes.
Right.
We think about you guys, our listeners, every time I prepare an episode as we're recording, like that's what's important.
We want to make sure that everything we're sharing is super useful for you.
So we are very audience centric.
Yeah, I would agree.
Yeah, I would agree.
I feel like we're a little bit obsessed with our listeners in a good way.
You know, we're always thinking about you guys.
Every time we're thinking, how are we going to present this grammar, this vocabulary?
It's all about connection.
In my mind it's about how are you going to take this out on the street into your workplace and use it to connect right?
So yeah, we're pretty audience centric.
What are we talking about today?
By the way, we're talking about how words like audience centric are created when we combine two adjectives and make a compound adjective like audience-centric.
There are many others.
We'll share a few of them today.
But this episode was inspired by your interview with Matt Abrams.
I was reading the transcript and he said let's see.
He said I'm a big fan of finding structure, being audience-centric and focusing on connection.
And I was like ooh, that's going to be a good episode, because we do this with a lot of different adjectives.
Yeah, and it's good when you can use this to talk about what your focus is in your life, in your career.
I love that conversation with Matt.
I hope we can have him on the show again.
Great, Aubrey.
Well first, before we get into it, we want to remind our listeners hit that follow button so that we drop right into your listening queue.
We're in the new year now.
It's time to set up this new habit.
You know some of our listeners.
We've seen them move from 50 comprehension to 75 85 just listening to the show.
Yes, which is amazing.
And if you missed that interview with Matt Abrams, which was fantastic, likely you're not following the show.
So the episodes aren't dropping right into your queue.
That one was 2064.
You could scroll back and get it, but hit follow so that you don't miss any of our amazing episodes.
Yes, good stuff.
So I think our listeners are ready for some vocab that they can implement right away in their lives.
Where do we start today?
Yes, absolutely.
Our first one is audience centric.
So centric just means centered upon or focused around.
So you can take a lot of different nouns like audience attach centric, and you have a compound adjective.
So we have the example that Matt said.
Can you give us another one, Lindsay?
Yeah, so here we go.
The writers wanted to be audience centric, So they studied feedback from focus groups.
And of course, if you are a writer, you need to be writing for your reader.
Absolutely.
Right.
Film writers, screenwriters, they're all trying to be audience centric.
Right.
Who am I targeting?
Who's going to want to see this?
And you might have focus groups.
You're trying to get feedback to make sure that you're focused on the audience.
Certain shows are better at this than others, but it's always interesting when you see shows pull in modern trends.
One show that was really good, really audience-centric, was the good doctor.
Did you ever see that?
The good doctor?
Yes, i liked that show.
I'm i'm not caught up, though i need to go.
Yeah, i think they're coming back with another season so you have some work to do before but yeah, so that show really does a good job of looking at modern trends in society, like politics, things that we're talking about, not just in the political level, but on the social level right, human beings, identification.
They bring it all into the show so it feels so real, like this could happen in real life.
Absolutely, which is so important if you're going to really grab an audience, engage an audience.
If you at work are doing a presentation, leading a meeting, you want to be audience centric.
You want to be thinking about who are you presenting to and how will this come across.
Yeah, and i love the next one, because it's super important customer centric or client centric.
Customer versus client any any uh sense of the difference there?
Yeah right, so when you are selling to someone, anyone purchasing a product, we usually would call a customer, whereas if your business is working with another business or a company, then we'll often call them a client, but sometimes we use these interchangeably.
Yeah, I love that, exactly.
So any sample sentences we could use here?
When it comes to the customer-centric and client-centric Yes, we might say product sales are down.
I'm not sure we're as customer-centric as we need to be.
Really important insight.
You have to really always know what your customer is interested in, what they need, or sales are going to go down.
You have to be willing to be honest.
If you're running a company at a leadership level, or even you just need to make a suggestion, we need to be honest with ourselves of what we're doing wrong.
Yes, and open to pivoting and changing what we're doing if we're not customer-centric enough.
What about client-centric?
Let's give another example.
Yeah, here's an example.
So they lost the contract when they weren't client-centric enough.
Nice.
Yeah, so you could see this happening, right?
If we're not focused enough on what our client needs, you could lose the contract.
It could cause great repercussions.
Yeah, for sure.
And it could take you by surprise too sometimes, right?
If you're a consultant, for example, working with a company and they make new budgets, you always want to be looking for feedback from your client.
If you're a consultant, you have a client, a large company, look for feedback on your work, right?
That's always good to do.
Yeah, good stuff.
Absolutely.
All right.
Another one we see often is kid-centric.
I see this a lot when I'm looking for activities and events to take my kids to.
I might see something described as kid-centric, meaning we've thought about the kids, right?
They're the focus.
We're going to make sure there are activities for them.
Yeah, for sure.
So, for example, the event was definitely kid-centric, with most of the activities appealing to young children.
Yeah, I wonder how that is as a mom trying to navigate options for the weekend, right?
And how do you find a balance between something you wanna do and enjoy?
And something that is designed for the kids.
What do you usually do, Aubrey, as a mom?
It's especially tricky for us because we have older teenagers and then sort of a gap and younger kids as well.
So it's very difficult to find something that's entertaining for both the older kids and the younger kids and myself right.
And me as well.
It's hard.
Every now and then we'll find some type of festival or activity where they've really covered all their bases.
They're kid-centric, they're teenager-centric and adult-centric.
Yeah, yeah.
What about just like a baseball game?
I feel like that could work.
Could that work?
Something like that is perfect, right?
My husband recently took all of the kids to a hockey game and they all loved it.
Like they loved the food and the snacks and the exciting game.
Like a lot of things are just good for all ages.
Oh, my God.
My brother, my niece plays hockey, actually youth hockey.
And my brother loves to take my niece to hockey games.
That is yeah, any kind of sporting event, because they always do fun things for teenagers on the, on the TVs, the big TVs and games for kids.
And then, of course, as an adult, you enjoy the game and the conversation.
So that's a good way to go.
Absolutely.
One more example you might say let's make sure the fundraiser is kid-centric, since many families with children will be attending.
So if you're planning an event, you'll want to think about who's going to be there.
Does it need to be kid-centric or adult-centric?
Who are we focusing on?
Yeah, I love it.
So good.
Okay Aubrey, so do we have an important caveat, a little grammar piece we want to let our listeners know about here, something they need to know.
Yes, the punctuation is tricky when you're adding centric to a word.
You will have a hyphen between the noun and the adjective.
Centric becomes a compound adjective when it is before a noun right.
So, for example, an audience centric presentation means a presentation that's focused on the audience, and you would hyphenate audience centric.
This can be a little confusing, because not every word with centric is centric.
A compound adjective like this, like the word egocentric ethnocentric, this is a word on its own.
And so there's no hyphen.
Yeah.
And so there's a lot more to learn.
We can't cover all of this today, guys.
We want to send you back to another episode.
That is 1901.
Does English grammar make you happy go lucky?
Talking about compound adjectives, but just to get a quick gist, right?
If I can bring my dog to a hotel, which is always good to find a dog-friendly hotel we would say is this a dog-friendly hotel?
Aubrey, would we need a dash there, a hyphen between dog and friendly?
Yes, because it's a compound adjective before the noun, dog-friendly hotel, it would be hyphenated.
But Lindsay, what if you say, is this hotel dog-friendly?
How does the punctuation change?
So we don't need the hyphen when it comes after that noun.
Is this hotel dog-friendly?
All right.
So at that point, it's no longer needing the hyphen.
So guys, if you're confused about this, first of all, you're not alone.
A lot of native speakers are confused about this.
Absolutely.
We see a lot of mistakes made by native speakers as well with these.
Yeah, so go over, first listen to that episode.
And then a tool like Grammarly is super helpful for this kind of thing, right?
I use Grammarly inside my emails just to make sure I'm not making these little mistakes, and you can find resources to help with that.
Absolutely.
And we use this with many different words, right?
You might see millennial centric, Gen X centric, female centric.
And at one point, it was definitely becoming overused.
And when I was looking this up, I saw an interesting article in the New York Times by Philip Corbett.
This is from 2013.
And he was really passionate about the fact that we were using this too much.
He said that he had counted 150 times that centric had been added to make a compound adjective that year, in 2013, in the New York Times.
And then he compared it to previous years.
He said in 2000, that was only 72 times and just 24 in 1995.
So it really spiked in usage there, didn't it?
It ramped up.
I love it when linguists get passionate.
I love reading in the New York Times, the linguist columns.
I would love to interview a linguist from the New York Times in the opinion column about language, because there's so much that can be said there.
Yes, absolutely.
And it's interesting to think about how things have changed.
Maybe he inspired a movement, but I don't know about you, Lindsay.
I hear this every now and then, but I'm certainly not seeing it in every article, right?
It's a little more rare, I think, than it was when he wrote that article.
Well, it's funny because I'm trying to think, because that's right around the time that our show All Ears English was born.
We were born exactly at that time, the fall of 2013.
And I'm trying to think what was going on in the culture at that time that would cause that word to be so commonplace, right?
Interesting.
That is interesting to think about.
It could be social media was kind of having its peak.
I feel like social media, Facebook, kind of peaked around 2010, 2011, 2013.
And maybe it was talking about brands again becoming more customer-centric, because they're connecting on social media all the time.
Yes.
And this he has a list, an exhaustive list of all of the words that had been seen in New York Times.
And it was a lot more like they would just say like window centric.
This house is window centric, chair centric.
Like we were adding all kinds of words that now we're a little more picky about the words we add centric to.
It seems like.
Huh.
Okay.
That's fascinating.
I like to go back in time and see what was going on in our heads at that time.
But different time, different era.
So Aubrey, do we have a role play here?
Yes, let's do it.
You and I are planning an event in this role play.
All right, here we go.
I saw the posters that were printed and I really liked them.
I agree.
They're very customer centric and I think will appeal to the crowds we're hoping to draw.
Definitely.
I know the marketing team was trying to be audience centric and I think they nailed it.
We expecting many kids to attend.
I noticed the activities weren't very kid-centric.
That's a good point.
We may want to add some kid-friendly entertainment.
Okay nice, we used a few here.
You can see how and this didn't feel unusual to see a few different ones in a conversation.
But As far as adding it to just any word, we might not say crowd-centric, marketing-centric.
We're not as free with it, I think, as we once were.
So maybe look for other options.
Maybe we can do a follow-up episode where we give our listeners other options outside of the centric, more vocab.
What could we use that could say this in a way that's not so heavy on centric?
Right.
So you said, I agree, they're very customer-centric.
Yes, we're talking about these posters, right?
They're appealing to the customers we're looking to draw, meaning to attract.
Yes, I love that.
And then what did I say after that?
You said the marketing team was trying to be audience centric and they nailed it.
So the marketing team was really thinking about who is our audience here?
Who's going to be interested in this event?
Yeah, i love it.
And then you said are we expecting many kids to attend?
I noticed the activities weren't very kid-centric right, so centered around kids, right?
So if there are only like beer gardens and dart boards and we know lots of families with kids will be coming, then we might say that's like oh, this isn't very kid-centric.
Yeah, that leads to an opinion question here.
When it comes to weddings aubry uh, what is your opinion on kids invited or kids not invited?
Like what do you think is?
I guess it's personal preference.
But if you are getting I personally prefer kids not invited.
Yeah, because as a parent of many children, it's nice to, every now and then, have an opportunity to get dressed eat, dance and not have to worry about where are my kids.
How are you know, how are they doing?
And so I understand when people want to make it kid friendly, and they'll invite the kids.
But I do feel like it's nice for parents to have an excuse sometimes to get a sitter and go out without the kids.
Hundred percent.
That's how we did our wedding.
We were very clear, you know, it's except for my niece was allowed to come, so she got a pass.
The one kid um, but basically no kids.
And actually our friends said thank you, because we want to go away for the weekend.
We want to fly to Colorado and have a fun weekend as a couple.
You know, absolutely.
Yes yeah, I agree, and no offense to you, know anybody who would rather have an event and have it be very kid friendly.
As far as weddings, sometimes you can have know sort of a kid-centric activity earlier in the day yeah, and then an adults only dinner reception, dancing at night.
You can kind of have the best of both worlds, it's true, it's true.
So anyways, good stuff.
Just want to know, because i feel like people have strong opinions sometimes about those things.
Very interesting topic.
Uh, maybe that'll be our poll for today.
Who knows, who knows any final takeaway for our listeners today.
Yes guys, adding centric like this does make your speech more native and natural.
Use it to connect in English, but definitely be careful not to overdo it.
I like your idea, Lindsay, of having a follow-up.
All the different ways we could say this, because if you're saying centric over and over and over, you might inspire another New York Times writer to get very passionate about scaling it back.
Yeah.
You never know when you're going to see yourself.
In the New York Times, the linguist columns that Ooh, that's me that they're griping about.
Ooh, guilty.
Raise your hand.
Guilty.
That's hilarious.
Maybe go back in time and talk with some of your native speaker friends, guys.
What was happening in 2012, 13 that caused this word to be so commonplace?
I don't know.
We have to go back in time.
Yeah.
Good stuff.
All right, Aubrey.
Thanks for being on the show today and talk to you soon.
Awesome.
See you next time.
All right.
Bye.
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