“You won't get into heaven through etymology”- Henri Tracol.
Nevertheless, sometimes a knowledge of the origin of words provokes questions.... To illustrate this, let us take the word home. English does have a number of compound words and expressions based on home, such as home coming, home economics, homeless, homely, home-made, homesick. Except for homely (which has come to mean modest, plain, ordinary), these words and expressions are clearly derived from home as an external place. But now let us look at German, a language where many words are related to each other by their common root.
Heim, home, brings us to Heimat, which has no English equivalent. It is in no sense political; it simply means the place I came from- which might be town, city, or region. Heimweh is usually translated as homesickness, but the sense of the German word is not that at all. There is no feeling of sickness in it- it is simply the (universally acknowledged) longing for the place one came from.
There are an extraordinary number of compound words based on Heim. Some of the verbs are straightforward: heimfinden, to find one’s way home, heimführen, to lead the way home, heimgehen, to go home. But heimgehen also means to pass away, and the noun, Heimgang, means both the way home, and death.
The adjective heimlich, means secret, the noun Heimlichkeit, secretiveness. Another adjective for secret is geheim, and the noun, secret, is Geheimnis, and so to Geheimwissenschaft- wissen, to know, schaffen, to make, Wissenschaft, knowledge, Geheimwissenschaft, esoteric knowledge.
Home- secret and close to home- where I come from and return to- the secret knowledge of what is close to home.