You're committing the etymological fallacy, if you are searching for some hint of gambling in Paul's passage. The dicing (kybia) is a metaphor for trickery because trickery and deception is the essence of gambling. He is not referring to gambling.
Ellicott comments,
Tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine.—The metaphor is of a ship drifting at the mercy of a storm, tossed by the waves, and carried round from time to time by every blast. The word “tossed” is more properly used of the waves (compare Jas. 1:6) themselves, but the following words seem to show that here it is applied to the ship rising and falling with them. The word “doctrine,” as usual, is a general word for all deliberate “teaching,” whether acting on the understanding or the heart. It includes, in fact, all influence consciously exercised to a definite end.
The metaphor is then dropped, and the evil influences to which childish instability is a prey are described—first, as the “sleight,” i.e., the sleight of hand of the dice-thrower, describing quick, sudden deceit of detail; next (to substitute an accurate translation for the unusually paraphrastic rendering of our version), as a “craftiness devoted to the systematic plan of deceit,” thus referring to deeper and subtler forms of delusion. This reference is so definite in the original, that we are tempted to believe St. Paul to have had in view some particular scheme of erroneous teaching, which had already struck root in the soil of Asia Minor. The Epistle to the Colossians shows that such false teaching had appeared itself at Colossæ; it was, perhaps, the germ of the more full-grown Gnosticism noted in the Pastoral Epistles.
"Lucy, why do you call your children 'kids?' Don't you see how offensive it is to liken your children to immature little goats?"
The word for baby goats is 'kid'. The speaker is arguing that 'kid' can only refer to baby goats.
One word with an unchanged meaning and a misleading etymology is antisemitism. The form of the word suggests that it refers to opposition to Semites, but when the word was coined in the 19th century, it specifically signified anti-Jewish beliefs and behaviors. Many peoples who are not Jewish were thought to be Semitic, and since the word Semite could thus also refer to someone not Jewish, the etymologically fallacious argument is made that antisemitism is not restricted to anti-Jewish beliefs and that opposition to other would-be Semitic peoples should also be considered antisemitism.
Or Appeal To Dictionary fallacy:
Description: Using a dictionary’s limited definition of a term as evidence that term cannot have another meaning, expanded meaning, or even conflicting meaning. This is a fallacy because dictionaries don’t reason; they simply are a reflection of an abbreviated version of the current accepted usage of a term, as determined by argumentation and eventual acceptance. In short, dictionaries tell you what a word meant, according to the authors, at the time of its writing, not what it meant before that time, after, or what it should mean.
Dictionary meanings are usually concise, and lack the depth found in an encyclopedia; therefore, terms found in dictionaries are often incomplete when it comes to helping people to gain a full understanding of the term.
Suggested reading: Exegetical Fallacies by D.A. Carson, a book that offers updated explanations of the sins of interpretation to teach sound grammatical, lexical, cultural, theological, and historical Bible study.
