The difference between specific and general
As we saw recently, the public are a general category. For general means “common to” or “widespread in” a group, a category or a population. For instance: “Dishonesty is general in Kenya.”
A “group” or “category” or “population” may be a called a genus because certain characteristics are general to the specific members which compose it.
Here the adjective specific derives from the noun species, just as the adjective general derives from the plural form, genera, of the taxonomic term genus.
As we know, all the species of a genus — like tigers, leopards and cheetahs — once branched out from a common evolutionary ancestor.
Even in ordinary language, that is the essential difference between the adjective specific (or special or even especial) and the adjective general.
Members of the cat family have certain general characteristics (which mark them out as a genus). But each cat species – say, the ocelot – has specific or special or even especial characteristics which distinguish it from all the other cat species.
The adjective generic refers to a whole class of things or ideas. “Drugs” is the generic term for all the substances which induce chemical changes in a consumer.
It is what gives us the noun genre, which refers to special categories in art and literature.
As I say, all specific members of a genus came from the same gene and, therefore — to tautologise – have the same genesis, the same evolutionary beginning.
Thus humans, apes and monkeys are close genetic relatives. Genetics is the study of heredity and variation in organisms.
Human genome
The genome is the complete set of haploid chromosomes that an organism passes to offspring. When the human genome was cracked in 1997, it became possible even for Monsieur Le Pen to see that all human races belong to the same species that Stephen Oppenheimer (in his book Out of Eden) calls Anatomically Modern Humans.
Genus, gene and genesis are akin to the Greco-Latin gens (plural gentes), which referred to a group of human families claiming common blood. Gentes was what gave us words like Gentile, gentry, gentility and genocide.
Genocide is the killing of a whole tribe. Gentile describes a tribe or a clan. Gentile is also the English translation of the Hebrew word Goyim, which refers to all non-Jewish societies, especially such ancient enemies as the Edomites, the Kittim (imperial Rome) and the Christians.
Gentility means good conduct. But it originally referred only to people of “noble” birth, namely, the aristocratic class. The ruling feudal aristocracy claimed that only it — the “nobility” — was capable of gentle and genteel behaviour: La noblesse oblige!
That is the sense in which Moliere uses it in his work Le Bourgeois-gentilhomme. Its English translation as The Would-be Gentleman is unfortunate because it kills the class significance of the original title.
Moliere is laughing at a crude bourgeois social climber who manages to reach the top — becoming a “Gentlemen”, but only in title. For he retains the moral Philistinism and intellectual simplism genera to the bourgeoisie.
