Is GENERICIDE a bad choice or morphemes?

[Baker, John]

        But there are other words that are used in senses at odds with their morphologies.  Consider escapee; one would suppose that the person who escapes is the escaper, and the person or thing escaped is the escapee, but a different meaning prevails.  Another example is looker, which means a person who is looked at, not one who looks.  I was also going to trot out informant, which is used in lieu of the stigmatized informer, but I guess that isn't really at odds with its morphology.


John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf
Of Laurence Horn
Sent: Friday, March 04, 2005 2:41 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Is GENERICIDE a bad choice or morphemes?



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.