[Suppafly]

>"The vast majority of people" would use words without thinking they have etymology and meaning?

That mostly seems to be true whenever you talk to people who don't specifically have some interest in linguistics.

>Maybe you're only thinking about religious people who would have encountered this one in such a context?

Yeah, presumably the original questioner (and myself because it's not something I've ever given much thought towards) didn't realize synoptic had a definition outside of religion, because knowing the definition would have answered their question.

[lolinder]

> knowing the definition would have answered their question.

This is often untrue, though—words will evolve along parallel tracks and often diverge quite significantly in how they're used across different contexts. In those cases the homonyms make for fun etymological deep dives but don't help much for deriving the specialized meaning from the more general one.

[Suppafly]

>This is often untrue, though—words will evolve along parallel tracks and often diverge quite significantly in how they're used across different contexts.

Sure that happens, but mostly when they are borrowed from language to language. Mostly in the english language, if you have a situation where you have synopsis and synoptic, it's more often than or not that they are different forms of the same word or closely related. I think it doesn't immediately register for people because those 'sis' words from Greek origin aren't used a ton in general speech. Genesis and genetic is a similar situation that many people probably don't realize they are related unless they are familiar with abiogenesis or such from science.

[lolinder]

> it's more often than or not that they are different forms of the same word or closely related

Correct, but what I'm saying is that frequently etymologies are nothing more than fun exercises that would actually mislead you as to the modern definition because the word has changed so much. In those cases it's amusing to identify the shared root but you should be careful about blindly translating from one to the other. The original sense is often somewhere in the middle of the two modern meanings.

Taking your example of Genesis: if I know that Genesis means "the first book in the Bible" that doesn't help me derive the definition of "genetic" all by itself. Likewise if I know the "genetic" means "relating to the structures that encode traits in living organisms", I won't be able to arrive at "the first book in the Bible". At best I might come up with some folk etymology explaining that Genesis has to do with life, which is close but not fully accurate.

The correct understanding of the shared root of "creation" is only possible if you understand both concepts and triangulate to what they have in common. It cannot be derived from only one of the two definitions.