Someone was explaining why they wanted to explore certain topics. At some point, they used the word freedom.

The question was simple: what do you mean by freedom?

The answer was equally simple: well, you know what it means.

That's exactly the problem.

A word is an empty container. Anyone can fill it with their own experience, their own history, their own priorities. Freedom, to one person, means autonomy of choice. To another, it means absence of constraint. To someone else, it means time, or the ability to move, or financial security.

None of these versions is wrong. The trouble starts when two people use the same word and assume they're talking about the same thing, without ever checking.

In that moment, alignment is only apparent. Reality will eventually make that visible.

This pattern becomes particularly insidious when working with abstract concepts: values, shared objectives, behavioral norms, guiding principles. Things that carry real weight on how people work together and make decisions every day, but that are often treated as if their meaning were self-evident, shared by nature rather than by deliberate choice.

It almost never is.

The cost is paid over time: misunderstandings, unmet expectations, conflicts that seem to emerge from nowhere but carry much older roots. Roots planted in the moment when no one stopped to ask what we actually mean by this word.

Defining the meaning of words isn't an academic exercise. It's a concrete act of alignment. Not because people are operating in bad faith, but because we systematically take for granted what should be made explicit, at every level, in teams and communities, in informal exchanges and strategic meetings alike.

Stopping to ask "what do you mean by that?" is one of the most useful things you can do in a conversation. And one of the rarest.

The assumption of shared meaning doesn't announce itself. It just waits.