Root of the Week: GEN (Thursday)

THURSDAY Genre/Generic (adjective)

Because gen relates to families, words that contain gen also refer to non-human groups or categories. For example, genre is another word for category.  Rap is one genre of music, poetry is one genre of literature, horror movies are one genre of film. When people refer to genre fiction, they mean the types of novels that clearly belong to a category, such as detective fiction. Something is said to be generic if it has all the qualities typical of its category.  Often this word is dismissive: if something is labelled as merely generic, it is unoriginal, predictable, mediocre. But generic drugs are often very welcome since a generic drug is a medication that is chemically identical to a patented drug but can be obtained more cheaply.