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How do you think the jury voted? Well, they laughed both Joe Bob Richards and his English professor right out of court. When Texans speak of oil and gas, they are referring to petroleum, not olive oil; the root origin of the word oil is quite irrelevant. And that's true of any other word. If you wanted to know what the writers of the Constitution really meant, would you hire a linguistics professor to explain the root meanings and derivations of all the key words in the Constitution?
Of course not; that's simply a matter of common sense. In the English language, we can immediately see how ludicrous it is to try to interpret a document by using etymology. And what is ludicrous in English doesn't suddenly become logical when we switch to Greek. When you and I write letters to someone, are we cognizant of the root meanings of the words we are using? Do we intend the recipients of our letters to look at the root meanings of our words when they read our letters? Of course not.
So why should we think it was any different with Paul and his readers? Let's face it: most people don't even know the root origins of the words they use. I certainly don't. Did you know that our word "gas" comes from a Greek word meaning chaos? I didn't. I was also surprised to learn that the root word for employee means "to fold," and that the root meaning of coin is "wedge." I could go on and on. Generally speaking, a word means whatever the general population understands it to mean.
As a result, meanings change over a period of time. So the root word from which a term is derived is generally irrelevant. In interpreting 1 Corinthians 11, our quest should be to determine what Paul's words meant in his day, not what they meant when they were first coined centuries earlier. Paul wasn't writing to Greek grammatical scholars schooled in etymology; his readers were probably not even aware of the origins of the words he used.
In summary, all three of the principles discussed here have some validity, but not one of them has been able to bring Christians to any consensus on the meaning of Scripture, and none of them is really of much help in deciphering our passage from 1 Corinthians 11. So now let's look at a system that can decipher that passage for us.
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