Is GENERICIDE a bad choice or morphemes?

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:49 PM -0500 3/4/05, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>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.

Ah, good point. I can certainly imagine "copicide" in the sense of
"cop-killing", and have seen "suicide by cop" [25,400 google hits] a
lot more often than "copicide" [321 google hits.  But they certainly
exist and do have instrumental and not theme readings on the relevant
senses.  I think that they definitely are blends and that the
"suicide" part is essential--could a nurse who kills patients by
medication be said to commit medicide? (I suppose that would be
homicide + meds.)  What about accidental overdoses, which also
involve death by means of medication?

One interesting question is then whether that was in fact the
intention underlying the formation of "genericide":  the idea being
that the brands themselves are acting as agents and gradually
committing suicide and using genericization as the means to that end.
Not impossible, I admit.  Let's check "commit genericide":  yup,
there are a few, anyway, with the "suicide" understanding.  Verrrry
interesting.  OK, I'm (partly) convinced, but I still find the term
very misleading, unless it's used precisely for those cases in which
the trademark (or the company owning it) is responsible for the
genericization.  And that's not the general phenomenon under
discussion here, in which it's ordinary speakers, and not Kimberly
Clark, that use "kleenex" to refer generically to tissues.

Larry