genuine [L16th] ‘I rather choose to keep to the Language of the Sea, which is more genuine, and natural for a mariner.’ So wrote Woodes Rogers, the English privateer, in 1712. Genuine is used here in its original sense, ‘natural or proper’. The source of the word is Latin genuinus, from genu ‘knee’, with reference to the Roman custom of a father formally acknowledging that a newborn child was his by placing the baby on his knee.