Simple means composed of a single element, not compound, unentangled, being the opposite of "complex", which of course means consisting of many different and connected parts. Instead Go people prefer the term to mean the now more popular meaning, which is "easy to understand, familiar".
I think a parallel can be drawn with another word from the English language: "free". You see, English doesn't have a word for the latin "liber" (libre, at liberty), like other romance languages have and I can name at least Italian, Spanish, French and Romanian (my own tongue). In these romance languages there's a firm distinction between libre and gratis, whereas in English there's no adjective signifying liberty without also meaning "at no monetary cost". I find that to be interesting and I bet it happened most probably because at some point in time these 2 issues were correlated.
Back to simplicity, while you can often correlate simplicity with easiness, mixing the terms is unjust because sometimes simple things aren't easy at all and sometimes easy things aren't simple at all (much like how sometimes gratis things are restricted and liberties aren't gratis). Speaking of which in my own native tongue the word for "easy" is also used to signify weightlessness (light, soft). Makes sense in a way, but you can see how language works.
And it would be a shame to lose the true meaning of "simple", just because its usage is at hand when trying to describe things that are or are not desirable. As in the end, this is how the meaning of words gets diluted and lost: because of our constant desire to make other people believe our ideas and buy our shit. So we exaggerate. Just a little, after all, we are only going to end up with a language that's ambiguous. What does it matter if "open source" has had a clear definition since OSI and that it wasn't in use before that, it's marketable dammit, so lets use it for all shit that has source-code available. Etc, etc.
And I get it, saying that generics aren't easy isn't so appealing, because that would be an acknowledgement of one's own capabilities and knowledge, being a metric relative to the one who's speaking. Whereas simple is an objective metric, with things being simple or complex irregardless of the person that's passing judgement. Still, generics are only as complex as static type systems. When you have a statically typed language, generics are a natural consequence. And if you don't add generics, then you need to add an "Object", "Any", "dynamic" or whatever you want to call it, which would be a whole in that static type system, not to mention introducing special cases (like the builtin arrays and maps) and that's complex by definition. Java did as well, introducing generics at version 5, when it was too late to do it cleanly and the result isn't nice at all ;-)
