Is GENERICIDE a bad choice or morphemes?

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:24 PM -0500 3/4/05, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>In a message dated 3/4/05 11:13:46 AM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:
>
>
>>  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?
>>
>>  Larry
>>
>
>I don't think that I got this message,

It was when I was thanking you for sending me your paper on the topic:
==========
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 09:31:01 -0500
To: Ron Butters <RonButters at aol.com>
From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
Subject: Fwd: 16.520, Review: Historical Ling: Curzan & Emmons (2004)

(P.S.  I find "genericide" clever but a bit misleading, since it's
not the generic which is killed off, but the specific killed off by
the generic, right?  Rather different from suicide, matricide,
genocide, and the other players on that -cide.)
==========

>  but be that as it may, GENERICIDE _is_
>the common legal term for the process, and, being a descriptive rather than a
>prescirptive linguist, I am not to eager to quarrel with them on such purist,
>prescriptivist grounds as Larry enunciates here.

Purist shmurist; let's try to keep the discourse civil and avoid slurs.

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.

>  There is also an arcane
>linguistic term that I am not able to bring to mind right now
>(invented perhaps by
>someone at Merriam-Webster a few years ago an posted on their website) and
>that someone in this thread actually used a few turns ago. It has a
>nice ring to
>it, but it is also (as I recall) totally opaque and (for me at least)
>obviously difficult to remember.

I began using the term "antonomasia" for the process after I noticed
a paper Roger Shuy presented on the topic (using that term) at the
LSA or a satellite conference.  Looking it up on the internet, I see
that it does indeed have that meaning (although perhaps a broader
range of applications as well), and has the advantage of opaque
enough to not appear to signify the opposite of what it is designed
to signify.

Larry