Puddings

[Carol]

Amanda wrote:
> 
> Interesting.  This is not precisely the same, because Coke started
life as a brand name, but Texans (San Antonians?) use "coke" as a
generic term for soft drink. The term's meaning has extended to
encompass the category.
> Example: "Do you want a coke?" "Yes" "What kind?"

Carol responds:

When I was in North Carolina in the 1970s, all soft drinks were
"cocola." "Do ya'll want a cherry, orange, or 7-up cocola?" Now a
cherry Coke is one thing, but an orange or 7-up Coke? Coca Cola
flavored with orange or 7-up? Of course, that's not what was meant at
all. 
> 
Amanda wrote:
> There's a word for that. Not the brand name becoming a word; but the
extension of meaning. Pudding, one type, extended its meaning to the
entire category.

Carol:

A lot of people object to the brand name being used as a word as if it
were some sort of copyright violation to call a tissue a Kleenex,
which I did until I got tired of being jumped on by younger people.
"Xeroxing" documents, too.

But with reference to the extension of a word's meaning to include
related terms, in poetry it's called metonymy (substituting one term
for a related term, like using "the crown" for "the king" or calling
the Duke of Gloucester "Gloucester" (I once read a critique of LOTR
that referred to the Witch-King as "Angmar," the name of his realm at
the time of Glorfindel's prophecy). I think that the term is also used
in linguistics to denote a specific form of "generalization," the
process by which a word's meaning becomes broader of more general, as
opposed to "Specialization," the process by which the meaning becomes
more specific.

Not being a linguist, I don't remember much more. There's also
"amelioration," by which the word comes to mean something nicer or
better than it did originally, and "pejoration," by which it comes to
mean something more unpleasant or repugnant than it formerly did.
IIRC, there's some other process in which the word comes to have
nearly the opposite of its original meaning, but I could be
misremembering.

Carol, not intending to go any deeper into the subject because she's
forgotten too much