For sure I don’t want to argue what the current law/attitude is. I think that trying to work between the current law and the etymology of the words 1000+ years ago is a bad way of understanding the laws of today. I think one would do better to look over a wider range of historical sources.

The source for what I wrote is the Oxford English Dictionary (the one that comes in 20 volumes) but it may be that that entry hasn’t been updated in a long time.