My husband does this. He answers the question he thinks I’m really asking.
Me: you want to watch Brain Dead tonight?
Him: you have the Great British Baking show recorded. (He thinks that’s what I want to watch and am just being nice).
Me: I know. I just wanted to know if you wanted to watch Brain Dead. I can watch GBBS when you’re out of town next week.
In my experience, it’s “women”. Well, okay, it’s mostly one. My best friend’s wife.
He or I text her: “Are you home yet? We’re down at the pier with a cooler of drinks. Can you come down? Bring the dogs and a bottle opener.”
She’ll reply:* “Fun!”*
It has been years of this. Once I was waiting for her at a music festival out of town, not being able to get a straight answer whether she’ll be there soon, later, or if she even left town yet. Or does she have any intention of coming?* “Sounds cool!”*
Oh, not with a different friend: “Well, I was thinking of making pie, do different kinds of pie have different ingredients? Oh, have you tried Cashew Milk? It’s like soy, but kinda, i dunno, earthy. Are you going to Trader Joe’s, there’s a bookstore across the street now…”
I see no difference at all between the milk question and the OP’s examples.
This is a key thing to note. How on Earth are people supposed to magically know when asking question whether they are asking a simple question or one “so nosey or so incomplete …”?
Anyway … another classic non-response to question:
“Do you have a dictionary?”
“What do you need a dictionary for?”
My mind sort of goes blub-blub-blub at this point. The inner reptile brain wants to scream “It’s none of you bleeping business! Yes or no: do you have one.” Then the “social” brain basically wants to smile and walk away.
The best I can usually muster is something like “Because I want to look up a word.”
Of course, you can guess the “answer”.
“What word?”
And on and on.
All questions deserve to be properly answered. If a question is too personal just say so. That at least counts as an answer. There is no such thing as expecting a fuller conversation.
Nothing wrong there – if I can tell you the meaning of a word without you getting your grubby fingers all over my lovely dictionary, and save you some time, all the better.
I have a question for you: if you want to find out the meaning of a word, for example “atelophobia”, why wouldn’t you just say, “Do you know what atelophobia means?”
My wife does this all the time.
Loud noise from room she’s in
Me: “What happened?”
Her: “I’m all right.”
Me: “What happened?”
Her: “I’M ALL RIGHT.”
OK, since “What happened?” elicits a response as if the question had been, “Are you all right?”, logic suggests trying to establish if the reverse is true.
Me: “Are you all right?”
Her: “Unprintable.”
E-DUB, I completely understand your desire to obtain an objective assessment of the current situation first of all, and then worry about your spouse’s safety and well-being only as a secondary concern, if that. However, I think you should appreciate your wife’s approach in this situation. She’s giving you the benefit of the doubt by assuming that you’re actually wondering whether she’s all right.
My experience is that a great many people don’t actually ask the question that, when answered, will give them the complete and correct they seek. Instead they ask a question near it. Or they ask one that makes sense to them given the context in their head which is not in the head of the would-be answerer. And which seems like nonsense absent that context.
Some people, perhaps even our esteemed ftg, are good at avoiding these pitfalls and ask truly great well thought through questions that have sufficient shared context and are socially appropriate.
But pity the poor person who gets asked that excellent question. It’s the only such good question they’ll be asked all day. All the other questions from all the other questioners are the usual ill-thought out garbage.
Maybe I want the word origin, the pronunciation, the syllabification, antonyms, synonyms, or a complete list of all meanings. Maybe I’m not completely sure what I’m looking for but I think I can find it in a few minutes. And on and on.
I seriously doubt that you would be well versed enough to give me any and all of that to a sufficiently high degree of reliability.
OTOH, if you don’t want my grubby mitts on you dictionary, just say so. Why evade answering?
Being helpful is answering the question. Not being helpful is trying to think of some ridiculous reason to beat around the bush.
Responent: “Yes.” continues reading newspaper
Questioner: “So… where do you keep it?”
Respondent: "Bookshelf, bottom row, third from the left.*
Questioner: goes and gets dictionary, proceeds to look up ‘compendious’
Respondent: “HEY! GET YER FILTHY PAWS OFF MY DICTIONARY!”
Nope. You’re in my house, it’s my dictionary, and that’s my beer you’re drinking. So when it comes down to it and you unexpectedly have some pressing need to know the ins-and-outs of whatever word that popped into your head, at least have the decency to include me in the conversation.
OR (on the subject of being direct), say “TGU, I know you to be a pleb of little learning, so I won’t waste my time asking you the meaning of a very clever word that I think I might have just invented, do you have a dictionary?”
At least that way we’d be talking the same language.
Actually, I assumed that she was all right, because if she wasn’t I would have heard yelling or something (or nothing, in which case I would have ran to the other room).
Ignoring your specific example, very often it’s because if there was an easy answer I’d know it. And if I ask you, there is an extremely high probability you’ll give an answer which is wrong or incomplete or otherwise not useful. And then I will be in a dilemma. Because very often you’ll be offended when even after you give me your “answer” I still want the dictionary. Or I will have to pretend to accept your answer even though I’m pretty sure it’s wrong.
It’s one of the reasons I prefer to look up an address than ask. If I ask, you’ll very likely give me rambling confused directions, and get offended at my apparent lack of faith in your directions when I insist on trying to get you to tell me the address.
However, for lots of people. it’s nicer to have the written explanation, with, of course, variant forms of the word, etymology and so on.
If someone asked me a question like that, I would give them my answer, but give it while reaching for the dictionary to offer them. Or I might even want to check the dictionary myself in order to check whether I was right.
(And I didn’t know what “atelophobia” meant, so I’m glad to have learned something today.) 
Not how stuff goes down at my place:
Princhester: what does atelophobia mean?
TGU: fear of pie, from the Greek atelos “pie”, and, *phobos *“fear”
Princhester: you’re full of it, may I look in your dictionary?
TGU: sure, knock yourself out
(and at this moment, you had better hope that the dictionary doesn’t say: atelophobia, n.; an abnormal fear of pies. etym. Greek atelos “pie” + -phobos “fear”)
Firstly you have an amazing vocab, according to you. So what? Most people don’t.
Secondly, you have just given good evidence in favour of what I’m saying by admitting that if I doubt you, you are going to get offended if you are right. A better illustration of my point you couldn’t have given.
I’ll bet anyone with a fear of pies will have a weird rhubarb story from their youth.
Funny. I’ve lived in France for 10 years – I have lost the capacity to speak English with ease, there are times when the simplest of words escape me, and I have to make a very conscious effort with my spelling and grammar.
In the hypothetical case, the consequences of reaching for the dictionary only to find that I was right would be an “I told you so!”.
BTW I don’t see why you think I wouldn’t feel offended by the subtext “*there is an extremely high probability you’ll give an answer which is wrong or incomplete or otherwise not useful. And then I will be in a dilemma.” *when you ask for my dictionary, but would suddenly become offended if you say so expicitly after I’ve given my “best guess”.
Your friends and acquaintances aren’t your personal dictionary fetchers.
When you ask people random stuff with no context, you are basically excluding them from whatever you are doing, because without context they can’t participate. You are saying “I want you to do something for me, but I don’t actually care to even clue you in as to what is going on, much less include you.”
All I did was ask for your dictionary. It was your choice to get involved.
We are getting too bogged down in dictionaries. The OP is about asking questions and people not answering. That isn’t excluding anyone.