Telling a story: books and film

The list opens with o género, and it is one word doing what English has parcelled out among three, all of them borrowed and none of them interchangeable. The Latin genus meant a kind, a sort, a stock, and Portuguese inherited it whole. O género do livro is the literary kind; o género de uma palavra is its grammatical class; o género humano is mankind; and in a field guide o género is the rank sitting just above the species. English divided that estate. « Genre » was taken from French and kept almost entirely for art forms, so a genre is something a novel or a film belongs to. « Gender » arrived earlier, by way of Old French, spent centuries meaning chiefly the grammatical class, and has since taken on the social sense as well. « Genus » was lifted straight out of Latin by naturalists and has never left the taxonomy. The three are one word arriving three times by three routes, which is why a reader who meets género cannot translate it before deciding which of the three the sentence needs.