Players characters evading direct questions

[KorvinStarmast]

You can't hide behind "but people use words imprecisely all the time" if your own imprecision leads you to speak nonsense.

Welcome to the Internet Vahnavoi. An unfortunate number of those who grew up with poor language arts skills, or who otherwise neglected developing those, still show up on the internet and keep making excuses for sloppy and bad communication skills. As the warden in Cool Hand Luke pointed out: "What we have here is failure to communicate." Despite all of the noise there is very little signal.

"Agreeing with Vahnavoi" is not on the list of things I expected to do today when I woke up this morning, but yes, Talakeal. "People use words imprecisely all the time" is not a flawless defense against "this specific thing you have said, it is wrong to the point of being goofy." If you keep getting that reaction (when most of us don't), maybe consider that the fault is not in your stars?

See above. There is resistance to accepting that concept. Been seeing it for about three decades. If only September would end.

And if the fae actually are backstabbing manipulators who will enslave you if you give them any opening, then being super cagey about talking to them is way more rational than it might appear from "they wouldn't answer any questions from the people they were trying to recruit to help them."

Depending on the lore, or folklore, one is applying to a game setting, "The Fey are tricksy" is a common basic assumption.

Honestly, I am not sure how my using a word lazily could ever lead to me reaching a false conclusion as I know what I mean by the term.

But if you believe in a false definition you can still err.
I see this on occasion in aviation maintenance, where a misunderstanding of a technical term results in thousands of dollars of damage to a part, a damaged or scrapped part, or damage done unintentionally.

"No, it means this {other thing} to me" will not recover that part. That is the stance which you are taking, and it sets you up for error.

The above problem makes writing technical manuals and technical instructions so darned important. That discipline uses glossaries or industry standards that have a Common Language established so that one knows what words mean. (Or terms).

For our discussions here, a Common Language is very helpful (as RAW is in various rules discussions) to make sure that we are talking about the same concept. If you are talking about Budweiser beer, and I am speaking of Pork Rinds, our discourse has a lot of dysfunction in it.

When you take a word that embodies a concept, and you then twist or misapply it, you will - whether you mean to or not - twist or misapply the concept behind it and set yourself up for errors both large and small...in your native language.

It gets a bit rougher when using another language.