Very insightful and true. Even during a conversation, many people "translate" what they hear into something else, and will quote back, a few seconds later, a totally different sentence and think that's exactly what you said.

Kids in school often don't read assignments properly either, and skip everything until the first question. I don't know if they think it saves them time or fear there's a trick somewhere that they will avoid that way.

In life in general, people like ambiguity; it helps to smooth things out. But in programming it's a problem.