A word's original meaning isn't secretly its 'real' meaning

The etymological fallacy is the mistaken assumption that a word's oldest or root meaning is more correct than how it's actually used today — as when someone insists 'decimate' must mean 'kill exactly one in ten' because that's its Latin military origin, ignoring centuries of shifted usage. Linguists treat this as a basic error: language change is normal, and a word means what its current speakers use it to mean, not what its ancestors meant.

— Wikipedia contributors, Etymological Fallacy — Linguistics