Please

Ok this one wins. It has got to be the most difficult word I have ever randomly picked from the dictionary.  It was a word used for an instrument measuring oxygen.  The word started with “e”.
Well that was fortuitous.  I really did not mean it but I lost the page the word was on and I obviously had spelt it wrong as I really could not find it again.  So I picked a word at random again but this one seems too much like a set up.  The word was guilt.  So I’m going to do it again.  This one I will definitely go with.
The word seems incredibly polite.  “Please.” Though really, I can think of a couple of ways the word is used. 
The first is almost as a term of resignation.  “Do as you please.”  “Please yourself then.”  My experience of it being used that way is having it said when advice to the contrary is given and it is declared that it will be ignored.
There are times when ignoring the advice is a bad thing and at other times it is a good thing.  When the advice is, too much sugar over a lifetime in the diet can lead to diabetes and it is ignored, that to me is a bad thing.  At other times, the advice that is ignored was born of someone’s way of doing something that is deemed to be inadequate, and though a part of may be chosen, it is on the whole rejected.
I see that a lot.  People think their idea is the bee’s knees and the only way to go.  If they are in charge, they can run with it.  If not, the best they can hope for is it embraced.  Spitting the dummy hurts the suggester more than who the idea was directed to.
The other please at the very least softens a demand.  “Give me the coat” is a demand.  “Give me the coat please” softens that demand.  It is still a demand and the one in authority deserves my obedience but that does not mean it is the way I would do it.  I don’t know the one in authority needs to soften a demand as long as I know the command comes from a place of “we are all in this together and I will be there for you because I want to” rather than “because it’s my job.”  What I will try to avoid is like producing like when the one giving the command is giving it without thought for the consequences for me.  To me it was like that in the movie “Gallipoli” when the commander sent the troops over the trench based on what turned out to be unfounded hearsay.
But I do not hear the word in such circumstances.  In my situations it is always pleasing to hear the word please.  It is often as simple as “pass the salt please” or “could you go and get the cutters for me please?”  The expectation is reasonable but it is asked for in a way that does not come across as a demand based on one-upmanship but a request among equals.
I get more out of giving because I want to rather than I have to.