Well, the appropriate response is to politely ask for clarification. Sometimes asking a dumb question is a useful way to see how someone treats someone less experienced. I find treating interviewers with deep respect no matter how dumb they sound generally puts me in the drivers seat going forward.

If someone mentions array and list as alternatives in a generic CS context (not language specific), one generally familiar with the field should be aware of the concepts being referenced (one might reasonably ask to verify that the latter was a referenced to a singly-linked list, since while that's by far the most likely meaning in a generic context where it would be paired with an array, there are some other possibilities.)

That's not to say that failing to know that terminology should automatically result in rejection, but understanding that is not an unreasonable expectation when hiring something other than a narrow-focus language-specific code grinder.

I agree that the question needs improvement, it admits too much confusion unless there's a context. List is an ADT in Java and OCaml and some of the literature, an implementation in Python, C++ etc. Linked-list would have avoided that, although possibly suggests an answer.

Having said that, I'd be minded to look dimly on a candidate who tried to sidestep that question with 'but I use Python and they're the same there, so it's just a question of semantics' and did not try to clarify the question with me.

That's exactly it.