Is GENERICIDE a bad choice or morphemes?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005 14:40:30 -0500, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
wrote:

>>>  As I mentioned to Ron off-line a while back, I find this term
>>>  extremely misleading, since it strongly suggests the death OF the
>>>  generic, as in suicide, fratricide, regicide, genocide,...  But here
>>>  what is meant is death (or subsumption) of the trademark by
>>>  conversion TO a generic:  the generic is goal, not theme/patient.
>>>  Granted, "trademarkicide" isn't viable, but can't those lawyers come
>>>  up with something better than "genericide" for what isn't the killing
>>>  of a generic?
[...]
>All I'm saying is that a word containing partially productive
>morphology coined with the intention that it is to be used in a sense
>totally at odds with that morphology suggests is misleading at best
>and doomed at worst.  Anyone has the right to coin a word, for
>example, like _unfaxable_ (of a document), but to coin such a word to
>be used for the meaning "capable of being faxed" (or the meaning
>"capable of being shredded more than once, and served with pickles on
>the side") would be rather...peculiar.  If this be prescriptivism,
>make the most of it.

What about "X-(i)cide" coinages that mean "suicide by means of X"?

autocide: suicide by crashing the vehicle one is driving (RHUD)
copicide: suicide by provoking a police officer to shoot (Word Spy)
medicide: suicide assisted by a physician (AHD, Encarta)

Sure, these should properly be considered blends of "X + [su](i)cide", but
they at least point to the possibility of "-(i)cide" attaching to the
instrument rather than the patient of the action.  So "genericide" could
be thought of as death *by means of* genericization.


--Ben Zimmer