In my experience, I would say most people have problems with exactly this.
They don't even think about the possibility of noise/interpretation in the communication.
and they never stopped to think about it the way you did.
If you (+above commenter +any other HN per users) want a good Wikipedia article, the metalanguange/metacommunication ones do a great job of explaining how this works in CS friendly terms - the connection to meta programming is a great aside.