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Hydrogentlemanly
The gene of gene pool comes all the way from the ancient Greek word genos , which means birth. It’s the root that you find in generation , regeneration and degeneration ; and along with its Latin cousin genus it’s scattered generously throughout the English language, often in places where you wouldn’t expect it.
Take generous : the word originally meant well-born , and because it was obvious that well-bred people were magnanimous and peasants were stingy, it came to mean munificent. Indeed, the well-bred gen tleman established such a reputation for himself that the word gentle , meaning soft , was named after him. In fact, some gentlemen became so refined that the gin in gingerly is probably just another gen lurking in our language. Gingerly certainly has nothing to do with ginger.
Genos is hidden away in the very air that you breathe. The chemists of the late eighteenth century had an awful lot of trouble with the gases that make up the air. Oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and the rest all look exactly alike; they are transparent, they are effectively weightless. The only real difference anybody could find between them was their effects: what we now call oxygen makes things burn, while nitrogen puts them out.
Scientists spent a lot of time separating the different kinds of air and then had to decide what to call them all. Oxygen was called flammable air for a while, but it didn’t catch on. It just didn’t have the right scientific ring to it. We all know that scientific words need an obscure classical origin to make them sound impressive to those who wouldn’t know an idiopathic craniofacial erythema * if it hit them in the face.
Eventually, a Frenchman named Lavoisier decided that the sort of air that produced water when it was burnt should be called the water-producer . Being a scientist, he of course dressed this up in Greek, and the Greek for water producer is hydro-gen . The bit of air that made things acidic he decided to call the acid-maker or oxy-gen , and the one that produced nitre then got called nitro-gen .
(Argon, the other major gas in air, wasn’t known about at the time, because it’s an inert gas and doesn’t produce anything at all. That’s why it’s called argon. Argon is Greek for lazy .)
Most of the productive and reproductive things in the world have gen hidden somewhere in their names. All words are not homo gen ous and sometimes they are en gen dered in odd ways. For example, a group of things that reproduce is a gen us and if you’re talking about a whole gen us then you’re speaking in gen eral and if you’re in gen eral command of the troops you’re a gen eral and a general can order his troops to commit gen ocide, which, etymologically, would be suicide.
Of course, a general won’t commit genocide himself; he’ll probably assign the job to his privates, and privates is a euphemism for gonads , which comes from exactly the same root, for reasons that should be too obvious to need explaining.
* That’s a blush to you and me.