privilegio

A gift of a word, if you know the Latin. Privilegio is privus plus lex: a private law. That is not a folk etymology, it is what the Romans meant - a privilegium was originally a statute passed about one named man, which is why Cicero could be against them on principle. Everything the modern word carries is downstream of that: a privilege is a rule that applies to you and not to everybody, and the whiff of unfairness has been in the word since the beginning.

And yet Esperanto cannot see the seam. Both halves live in the language separately - privata is private, leĝo is law - so a learner is entitled to expect privatleĝo and to be annoyed that the language did not build it. It did not, because privilegio arrived from the international vocabulary whole, already fused, the way inspiri did. The morphology is real but it happened in Latin, centuries before Zamenhof, and Esperanto borrowed the finished product. This is the commonest shape of learned vocabulary in the language: transparent once explained, opaque to the affix rules.

How it is used. Privilegio covers the legal sense (an exemption, a right not everyone has) and the polite social one, where English says "it was a privilege". Note the second in the examples above: estas granda privilegio labori kun vi, with a bare infinitive doing the work of a noun clause. The adjective is privilegia, and privilegiita - the passive participle - is the one you want for privileged people, those who have been granted a privilege. Set it against rajto, a right: a rajto belongs to everyone, a privilegio to some.