Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Everything must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition to understand anything rightly.
(Emerson, “Swedenborg,” Representative Men, CW 4.68)
What's the gen in "genial"?
Let's look at our word in The Oxford English Dictionary (note that a subscription--available through library subscrptions or for a fee--is necessary to do very much on the online OED).
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/genial_adj1?tab=meaning_and_use#3067425
The meaning/sense entries are arranged chronologically, based on the earliest evidence, so our common sense of affability or good nature is only fifth, since its first attestation is in the eighteenth century. Emerson's sense of the word as involving one's intellectual power (genius, another gen word) is largely a nineteenth-century usage, as in the quotation about Swedenborg with a whiff of our affability sense and the now uncommon sense of relating to a person's natural character (an older sense, by the way of "genius," the spirit that guides and defines a person's individual nature in Roman mythology). So, what he says is that to understand things rightly we need to be ourselves, to be cheerfully affable, and to embrace our own powers. Not necesssarily bad advice.
But the earliest sense, relating to marriage, the joys of the nuptial bed, and procreation has faded away, something we'll spend some time on in a few weeks—the incessant changes in meaning and form that sometimes erase older senses of a word.
Some fun with words. The Proto-Indo-European root for the gen family is gn or gen (the [gn] consonant cluster is harder to pronounce than [gen] so the inserted vowel occurs in lots of places. In Germanic languages the voiced g changed to its unvoiced twin k. That helps explain why, in the King James translation of the Bible Adam knew his wife, and she conceived. Think about kin and the long-lost word ken, as in Keats' "Upon First Looking into Chapman's Homer":
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken
The gen words came into English from Latin and French. Knowledge and genitals turn out to be distant cousins. Other Germanic examples: kindle, kindergarten, kind, can, uncouth. Some Latin-French examples: notify, notable, noble (from Latin nobilis, worthy of being known).
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