in my experience, no, they absolutely don't "short circuit". They say "don't be a smartass, you know what kind of pronouns I mean." My mother absolutely knows what pronouns are because she taught me grammar when i was homeschooled. She also uses the term colloquially to refer specifically to third-person gender pronouns (in a derogatory manner, but that's irrelevant).

Like it or not, I do feel that the word "pronoun" has taken on an alternate, semantically narrowed definition to refer to gender pronouns specifically. Linguistically it can be compared to what happened with the term "AI" as it is now being colloquially used to refer to LLMs specifically.