Homogeneous

So far this year everyone has been too busy sitting in front of the television to go rioting, in England at least. But the Independent Riots Communities and Victims Panel has published its final report on why last August’s riots took place. Clearing the ground, it said: ‘We know that the rioters were not a homogenous group of people all acting for the same reasons.’

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There is such a word as homogenous, but it is not the one called for here. Homogenous is a synonym for homogenetic, meaning ‘having a common ancestor’. The riot panel did not intend to discuss whether the rioters had a common ancestry. Darwin used homogenous in the sixth edition of The Origin of Species, commenting on Ray Lankester’s distinction between structures that resemble each other in different animals ‘owing to their descent from a common progenitor’ (homogenous) and ‘resemblances which cannot thus be accounted for’ (homoplastic).

The marvellous complication was that surgeons later came to use homogenetic and homoplastic in the same sense, for transplant tissue taken from an individual of the same species. So homogenous became a synonym for two words with opposite meanings. It makes the theological distinction between homoousion and homoiousion look simple. In that case, Gibbon pretended that the difference of one letter was risible and ‘almost invisible to the nicest theological eye’ — as if the difference between cat and coat were negligible on a cold day.

No, the word the riot panel wanted was homogeneous. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the erroneous spelling of homogenous for homogeneous is less common that its mispronunciation, which it suggests is influenced by the verb homogenise, used since 1904 to describe something done to milk. The mistaken form homogenous to mean ‘of like kind’ is matched by the erroneous heterogenous, ‘of unlike kind’, also pronounced with the stress on the o.