Is GENERICIDE a bad choice or morphemes?

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:32 PM -0500 3/4/05, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>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.

Well, actually some of the web sites did seem to warn companies not
to "commit genericide" in just this way, but it was pretty rare.

>
>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.

Aha--just so, which makes the analogy with the "copicide" et al.
examples (= 'suicide by means of X') Ben brought up earlier less
compelling, leaving us with the nonce "hype-icide"-type nonce wordss
as models for the intended "genericide", if nonce words can be
models.  But on top of that, there's the garden path (= killing off
of a generic form) based on the far more usual theme/patient pattern.
I can imagine, for example, someone calling for the genericide of
sex-neutral "he"/"man" language, but again that's the opposite of the
intended sense for the antonomasia cases.

>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?

Yes they did, but that was dumb (given inter alia the countless
etymological hybrids in the language).   The issue of misparsing (as
equivalent, presumably, to "tautosexual", meaning 'of the same sex?
as derived from the Lat. "homo" = 'person'?) is much less likely to
have arisen in that case.

Larry