Co-incidentally, I've just been reading a review of a book called Liberalism: The Life of an Idea. It's a word which seems to mean diammetrically opposite things to different people.

Few words are as calculated to cause political confusion between the British and the Americans than the word "liberal". In the United Kingdom, to describe someone as a liberal is to associate them either with Britain's long-lived Liberal party (1859-1988) – the party of Gladstone, Lloyd George and David Steel; or with the free market economics of FA Hayek, Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher... In the United States, to call someone a liberal is to associate them with elite opposition to the free market economics of Hayek, Friedman, and Ronald Reagan. In America, liberals are mostly socialists, certainly defenders of "Big Government". They distrust capitalism, they are bleeding-heart pacifists, and they are diehard defenders of the welfare state.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/29/liberalism-life-of-idea-edmund-fawcett-review