Or we can use the word differently and retain its ability to mean something. To avoid being Socratic (i.e., to avoid acting like nit-picking other people's positions is a whole, legitimate school of thought) I think a good definition accepts that all freedom is relative, and that in increase in freedom means an increase in opportunities to choose something that will enrich and make better your experience of life. If a multitude of choices were all unpleasant it certainly wouldn't seem like a good candidate for a free situation. This means that incarceration is less free than (ho ho) freedom, that laws can exist to balance, rather than just to curtail freedoms, and that there is space to discuss autocracy and tyranny sensibly as being generally less free than, say, total democracy, as well as the denial of opportunity through poverty being a meaningful denial of freedom.
Also, everyone should read Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed (but you're free not to!).