In this study around care work and domestic work I consider how accounts of intention, identity and agency can get rerouted when research attention is on performance and languaging within relational activity. I address the question of the silences of language in socio-material-discursive practices where language-linked boundary-making processes of inclusion and exclusion ‘leave things out’, while these exclusions don’t go away and indeed are core to what is being done. My focus is thus on the unsaid in material-discursive interaction that underlies and undermines what is being enacted. I present and analyse research data on domestic work in South Africa and draw on the wider literature on social reproduction, the care industry and cleaning work. Domestic and care work provide telling examples of entangled relations of intimacy and distance, empathy and discrimination where relations are simultaneously inclusionary and exclusionary. I consider the buried, accumulated, and interwoven intentions of actors who show up in my research as less determinate and unitary than is sometimes thought to be the case in sociolinguistic research. I examine examples of discontinuity, disjointure, absence and loss in how meaning is made under such conditions of entangled intimacy and exclusion. I draw on Barad’s (2007, 57) argument that the “excluded in the enactment of knowledge-discourse-power practices plays a constitutive role in the production of phenomena”. My analysis traces discontinuities and disjointures in what is said and done and raises questions for sociolinguistic research that sees language as transparent, central or fulsome in producing social relations.