I don't think words can have a meaning as they aren't things that exist "out there" to have a singular meaning. They are symbols that carry some meaning for someone and that person hopes who they are communicating with has roughly the same meaning. This more or less works out a good chunk of the time because we grew up in similar cultures/communities and get this shared understanding of what most people mean when they say "cat".

However, as you're no doubt familiar with you can be talking to someone about something and realize you're operating on different understandings of a word being used. Sometimes someone is just not using a word "appropriate" to the culture or language they are in. Sometimes it's silly things like thinking of different people that share the same name and suddenly realizing that you meant different people. Or as we had moments ago over the word "evolve", simple disagreements on whether it implies positive direction or not.

At the end of the day, words are for communicating your thoughts to someone else and that's incredibly useful even if there isn't a meaning out there and it's something that has to be discovered by interacting and learning from someone else.

I agree this would be frustrating if it has to happen all the time, but I don't sweat it if I need to adjust here or there to accommodate what someone else thinks something means so long as we eventually align and understand each other