IT is curious how a single word evokes diametrically opposite reactions from people. And yet this contrasting opposition, in more ways than one, spices piquantly people's use of languages generally and the English language particularly.
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This is an auspicious paradigm that invests both written and spoke expressions with compelling and by that fact illuminating denotations, gamut and the infinite range of the human mind. Take a relatively compact and monosemous word like "democracy", for an instructive instance.
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I have used the word "relatively " since this same word democracy evinces, in the main, sharply differentiated emphases and certainly incorrigent brittling of tempers. One would find that while in some climes it attracts to itself a colouring and texturing of egalitarianism in society and transparency of government operation and operatives, bedrocked on accountability to the masses, in other climes it is just a chameleonic verbal mantra deployed at will to apologise for a working system.