Re: Re: Is GENERICIDE a bad choice or morphemes?

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

In a message dated 3/4/05 4:47:24 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:


> 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.
> 

It is not easy to imagine a company deliberately genericizing its own product 
name, nor even how it could be done. Legally, it is always the linguistic 
knowledge of ordinary speakers that is the issue.

I have been using the term GENERICIDE for several years, and I honestly never 
thought of the etymological problem that Larry brings up. Part of the problem 
is that -CIDE implies killing, whereas nobody really sets out to kill a brand 
name, it just happens as a sort of natural sociolinguistic process. Of 
course, as we all know, people are not very consistent in coining words from 
classical-language morphemes. Didn't people object to HOMOSEXUAL because HOMO is 
Greek and SEX is Latin?