It is with grave humiliation that I tow the shame of sharing a name with you. The correct one-word answer to Spike Parker’s question about brand names that come to represent the product generically (Xerox, Kleenex, Coke, Aspirin, &c.) is: synechdoche. Did the idea of looking for a word in, say, a dictionary elude your massive expertise as a researcher?
It’s also probably worth noticing that, while he’s in some sense a person, the mythic Greek king Tantalus (from whose name “tantalize”) is not really a person in the same sense as Louis Braille (“braille”) and J.T. Brudenell, the 7th Earl of Cardigan (“cardigan”). “Tantalize” ought properly to be regarded as derived more in the wise of “jovial” than that of “cheauvanism”. What in hell does Cecil pay you for?
Anyhow, sorry for the nastiness but I had to do it. Love the column. The Vatican Police speak Mandarin.
On an unrelated note, I have always found dictionaries to be wonderful devices when I know the word, but don’t know the definition. When one knoes the definition but not the word, as was the case here, the dictionary (my dictionary, at least) proves less helpful.
Dontcha just hate it when your first post is so on the money and shows off everything you’ve worked hard to accumulate over the years, no matter how few they are.
And then you find that you’re just pissing on your own shoe.
OK OK, I spelled it wrong but this is hardly my fault, the bees made me do it.
I just assumed that here in the future dictionaries work just as well backwards, what with all the lasers & such. I remain firm, nonetheless, that my shoe is dry & unfragrant. Don’t you people have jobs.
Yes, I do have a job, so I hope you appreciate the sacrifice I make by taking time out of my (short) lunch break to point out that it’s spelled “chauvinism”, not “cheauvinism”. (from Nicolas Chauvin, french solider who admired Napoleon, and about whom a recent opera was written.)
another_ian, glad to see you take our good-natured ribbing with a smile! Welcome to the SDMB.
Synecdoche sounds good for the stated phenomenon, but consider:
antonomasia - the use of a proper name to designate a member of a class (as a “Solomon” for a “wise ruler”); also : the use of an epithet or title in place of a proper name (as “the Bard” for “Shakespeare”).
Perhaps calling a tissue a Kleenex is more of an antonomasia, no?
Every Trademark attorney that I’ve ever talked to knows the meaning of the word. I’m not sure who coined it, and I doubt that it has found its way into the dictionaries yet.
A quick Google search of “genericide trademark” comes up with about 100 hits. Anecdotally, I remember the term being used in law school, remember reading at least one court opinion where the judge used the term, and know that many law review articles have used “genericide” to describe a word being made generic.
I’ll leave it up to the Straight Dope staff to run the expensive Lexis and Westlaw searches to determine how many judicial decisions use the term, whether it was mentioned in any congressional reports, what law review articles use it and which treatises use the term. I am almost certain McCarthy on Trademarks uses the term, but I don’t have a copy nearby.
Ignoring the fact that it’s not a real word, I don’t understand what it is supposed to mean. It’s not the generic term that has been “killed”, it’s the brand name that has been diluted and turned into a term for the whole class. This made-up word seems to be the reverse of the meaning it intends to convey.
It’s a grouping of letters, which can be pronounced, and convey a meaning. Even if you insist for a word to be a ‘real word’ it must be more than a hapax legomenon, it’s at least common enough to pop up on 100 pages on Google…
You said it yourself: “convey a meaning”. We are heading right down the Orwellian “goodspeak” road when we ignore perfectly good words that have developed logically over hundreds of years in favor of a handful of overused, ambiguous buzzwords, technobabble, and just plain dumbed-down English. When you stab someone, you don’t commit “knifeacide”. When you shoot someone, you don’t commit “gunacide” or “bulletacide”. So why do you commit “genericide” when you allow your brand name to become representative of the whole class of products? It’s like Kevorkian wanting to call medically-assisted suicide “medicide”. No, Dr. Jack, that’s the killing of doctors. The meaning of a word should be able to be divined from its root components. And that’s the end of my pet peeve, heh heh.
Genericide. The first portion of the word is from the word “Generic,” whose etymology is from the word “Genus.” Genus means a class, kind, or group. The last portion of genericide means to cut or kill.
Genericide is the “killing” of a “group” because, prior to the genericide of “Popsicle,” the word was defined as “the group of frozen juices on a stick from the Popsicle Corporation.” That definition was “killed” and in its place was “the group of all frozen juices on a stick.”
And anyway, genericide is a really cool-sounding name for the phenomena.
P.S. I have no idea whether the term “Popsicle” really has been found to be generic, or if it still retains its ability to act as a source-identifier.
