Graft

Over the last thirty years or so, it has become almost a Parliamentary rule that disgrace visits the two main parties in different ways. Tories are busted for sex, and Labourites are busted for graft.

- Julian Barnes, writing for The New Yorker... in March 1990)

Apart from Barnes' telling prescience (or, at least, his accurate analysis of the cyclical inevitability of political sleaze) I am reminded that, thanks to the many and various evils of the English language, 'graft' can mean - as a noun, in the political sense - 'rifling the public petty (and not-so-petty) cash box' and - as a verb, in the rugby-playing, gruff-Northerners-tilling-the-fields kind of sense - 'working hard and (implicitly) earning legitimately and (for added virtue) by the sweat of one's brow'.

But, because this is English, though the word simultaneously has these two meanings, it cannot, (of course) mean them both at the same time.