Spoken questions are answered through shared tacit frames, not literal content

Evidence

Have you ever noticed this that people never answer what you say? They answer what you mean or what they think you mean. Suppose one lady says to another, in a country house, ‘is anybody staying with you?’, the lady doesn’t answer ‘yes; the butler, the three footmen, the parlourmaid and so on’, though the parlourmaid may be in the room, or the butler behind her chair. She says ‘there is nobody staying with us’, meaning nobody of the sort you mean. But suppose a doctor enquiring into an epidemic asks ‘who is staying in the house?’ then the lady will remember the butler, the parlourmaid and the rest. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2542

Categorization

• DEFINE: Chesterton’s Father Brown states, in miniature, the mechanism by which everyday language carries class- and context-indexed meaning that the literal words do not.
• XREF: Sets up Gramsci’s account of common sense and folklore as the implicit frame that makes utterances legible — the same tacit-frame mechanism Said’s Orientalism and later representation theory assume.
• SEED: Angle: ‘Nobody of the sort you mean’ — how the unspoken frame (class, race, who counts) silently governs the answers people give, and what happens when a hostile questioner supplies the frame instead.