Hi @Ric ! 
Thank you for the warm welcome!
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Hey, thanks again for messaging me the mistaken references.
But, wait? I expected someone might argue: “Well, in those example contexts you gave sam- may be pleonastic, but in paticcasamuppada it isn’t.” And then give some sutta references I may have missed. I didn’t expect someone would think in these example contexts it also means co-arising! But, really? 
Can’t you agree that’s all too forced, going about translation the wrong way round? People just spoke an ordinary language, you know! 
They weren’t concerned about a “coarising” of wealth. The fact that zero translators translate it like that and that no dictionary suggests it, should make us think twice as well.
Also, the point of Thag1.30 is that sickness happened first, and only thereafter they realized it was time to be heedful. The sickness and heedfulness didn’t “coarise”.
Another daily life context is adhikaraṇa-samuppāda: the arising of a case to be dealt with by the Sangha—a case of a misbehaving monk, mostly. Not the “coarising” of multiple misbehaving monks! The opposite is adhikaraṇa-samatha, the settling of those cases. For example AN10.33: “He [the bhikkhu] is skilled in the origination (samuppāda) and settlement of disciplinary issues.”
Haha, that alone makes it worth the effort, my friend. 
That. And of course this mutual dependency of viññāṇa and nāmarūpa is still an outlier. Almost always Dependent Origination is represented as the sequence of twelve factors where each is just dependent on the previous. Now, obviously there are certain crossovers and interdependencies between all factors in real life, but the Buddha does not represent it in that way or ever use the word samuppāda to describe this. Nor is it used, as far as I’m aware, any more for the mutual dependency of viññāṇa and nāmarūpa.
The latter is a translation of imasmim sati, idaṃ hoti, not of imassuppādā idaṃ uppajjati. Regardless, both are about a general principle. There is death only if there is birth, for example. I.e. death depends on birth. This is always the case. It doesn’t mean the factors happen at the same moment. Obviously birth and death don’t. See e.g. SN12.10:
"Bhikkhus, before my enlightenment, while I was still a bodhisatta, not yet fully enlightened, it occurred to me: ‘Alas, this world has fallen into trouble, in that it is born, ages, and dies, it passes away and is reborn, yet it does not understand the escape from this suffering headed by aging-and-death. When now will an escape be discerned from this suffering headed by aging-and-death?’
"Then, bhikkhus, it occurred to me: ‘When what exists does aging-and-death come to be? By what is aging-and-death conditioned? ’ Then, bhikkhus, through careful attention, there took place in me a breakthrough by wisdom: ‘When there is birth, aging-and-death comes to be; aging-and-death has birth as its condition.’ (Bodhi’s translation)
The point is that if you can only die if you were born. It doesn’t mean that if you die, you will be born again. Otherwise there would be no escape from samsara.
Samuppada is a good example of where our loss of contact with the language has allowed people to overanalyze the Pali, in this case overthink the word itself. This kind of “zooming in” on the word rather than “zooming out” on the canon as a whole happens often, imo too often. Perhaps because it requires less effort and knowledge, and is more quickly “explained”, than examining the various context the word is used in. Also, it most commonly done not by translators who are primarily concerned with just translating the text (like Horner, Bodhi or Sujato) but almost always to support a point of doctrine, which is also quite telling. As an example, even the opposite of arising, namely cessation, has been subject to this. Some have claimed that nirodha does not mean ‘cessation’ based on the etymology of the word, instead of just looking how the word is used in throughout the suttas. This is clearly going about things the wrong way round.
Because you can’t chop up words like that, I’m afraid. That is not how language works. See A. K. Warder’s introduction in Introduction to Pali when he talks about prefixes generally not having a meaning of their own. With sam this definitely the case. Sure, sometimes it does mean ‘co’ or ‘with’. But just as often it has no real meaning at all (i.e. it is pleonastic) or it is merely an intensifier. As pointed out by @stephen, sambuddho doesn’t mean ‘co-awakened’, for example, and samkilesa doesn’t mean “co-defiled”. And that does not change in a different context either. It’s intrinsic to the very words itself that saṃ does not mean ‘co-’. It’s the same with samuppāda.
We should translate depending on contexts, not on the syllables of a word! And it seems there is no context where “co-arising” is justified.
Because no text I’m aware of explains the termsamuppada as something to do with coarising. All we have as a basis for this translation is just the syllables of the word, which can very easily mean something else. In lack of such direct usages, we should use the translation with the least assumptions. So we should just translate it as all the dictionaries suggest: as ‘arising’, not as ‘coarising’.
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Thank you Venerable, for that great post.
The difference seems to be one of translating Pali as a language, vs. translating to bring out certain pre-decided doctrinal points.
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