Is GENERICIDE a bad choice or morphemes?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005 16:47:13 -0500, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
wrote:

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

It's possible to create a nonce "X-icide" form that has the instrumental
sense (killing by means of X) but is *not* related to committing suicide.
Such forms aren't very common, but they're out there.  Here are two I
found:

-----
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.food.cooking/msg/0ad3590c9c85e3c9
I occasionally got up and got another glass of wine and some more food
until poor Bill had to haul my inebriated self to the hotel. And it was
worth every brain cell that died due to chardonnay-icide.
-----
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/archive/index.php/t-154600.html
I know how hype can easily ruin a good film, so I do empathize with you on
this.
[...]
yeah, i think it may have been a case of hype-icide for me...
-----

The first example might be considered borderline, since it's still one's
*own* brain cells that are being killed by Chardonnay.  But the second is
clearly non-suicidal: "hype-icide" = 'the killing of one's enjoyment of a
film due to advance hype'.  That seems pretty close to "genericide" = 'the
killing of a trademark due to genericization'.

I was going to mention the old form "aborticide" = 'the killing of a fetus
by means of abortion' (in OED, RHUD, and Webster's 1913), but it turns out
the etymology of that is "abort[us]" + "-icide", where "abortus" means 'an
aborted fetus', so it's not instrumental.  It's an unusual form, though--
resultative, perhaps, since aborticide results in an abortus?


--Ben Zimmer