[morelisp]

This is probably just age. I had two CS professors, one in the late 90s and the other around 2004, draw a similar distinction.

"Parametric polymorphism" was the "whole" feature, while "generics" meant specifically generic containers, usually wholly agnostic about their type parameters, like std::map or std::list. Since the rise of Java Generics (which are really somewhere in between, more than containers but less than full parametric polymorphism) I don't hear this distinction anymore.