This Side of the Pond

When I moved to America, it was fortunate for all involved that I didn’t need to learn a language in order to get by. Speaking in anything other than English has never been my forte, so I was relieved to know that, aside from when our versions of the mother tongue diverge, I would be mostly comprehensible to friends on either side of the seas.

But English wasn’t the only language on the table, as it turned out. It was just the most obvious form of communication. There are other ways to frame data and not all of them constitute a shared language.

Take how we measure things. It wasn’t long befor...