This article examines how the meanings of bogan, lawyer and teacher are interactionally attained in everyday encounters amid Australian speakers of English. Using methodological and theoretical insights from interactional pragmatics, the dynamic model of meaning, and dialogic syntax, it is suggested that locally situated, occasion-specific meanings of terms like bogan, lawyer and teacher, may be attained with respect to contingently-relevant trajectories of social action(s) in sequences of talk, but that participants draw from recurrent sequential practices for doing so. The article examines how speakers produce dialogic resonance via the use of recurrent syntactic frames to co-construct locally situated semantic fields encompassing different words and predicates in-situ, and how these are underpinned by common interactional process that ease the negotiation of locally-situated meanings. It is proposed that these locally-situated meanings draw from, and so are systematically afforded and constrained by aspects of abstracted lexical meanings to varying degrees, but that participants nevertheless are able to shape the meanings of those words for locally-situated aims. In sum, it is suggested that what a word is taken to mean in locally situated interactions is invariably interwoven with the recurrent practices for framing those word meanings across turns of talk.