The Vagueness of Precision

"Get it in writing," teachers, lawyers, businessmen and other sticklers for accuracy will say when they want to be sure everyone understands. Otherwise no one, ten years from now, will agree on what was said.
     But can you depend on the written word? Language - even English - varies from place to place. Grade-school teachers taught me, "A pint's a pound, the world around," meaning a pint of water always weighs a pound. And that is true, if you spend your whole life in the USA. Cross into Canada, though, and the imperial gallon still contains only 8 (imperial) pints, but it contains about ten pounds of water; a pint there weighs one and a quarter pounds.
     Most of the rest of the world, including Canada and Britain, now avoid such confusion by employing liters and kilograms that all nations define in the same manner.  But Americans can't be bothered to change.
      Well, alphabetical order is dependable all over the world, isn't it? Yes, if you file in alphabetical order, you can probably locate your papers again. If you use English, there are dependably 26 letters always in the same order. But the alphabet in Greek has only 24 letters; the Russian Cyrillic alphabet has 33.  The Thai alphabet has 46 consonants plus 33 vowel marks. The closely related Shan language gets along with only 17 consonants.
     But even the 26-letter "English" alphabet is pronounced differently in different countries. The last 3 letters in USA are pronounced "eks-wye-zee" but a German would pronounce them "iks-ipsilon-tset."
     The British comedian Alec Guiness based the plot of his movie 'The Lavender Hill Mob" on the difference in pronunciation in Britain and France. His team of crooks successfully rob an armored car of its gold shipment, but must smuggle it out of Britain before they can live in luxury. They melt the gold ingots and recast them in the shape of France's Eiffel Tower, which they usually make from lead, to sell in Paris as souvenirs. Camouflaged with a coat of paint, the average person cannot tell the difference. They mark the gold-containing crates with an "R"  (which Brits pronounce "ah") and tell their agent in Paris  be sure to not sell from crates thus marked. When the mobsters arrive in Paris to collect their gold they are horrified to see their French agent doing brisk business from the crate with the R mark.
     "But M'sieur," the agent says,"that is not an 'ah' (the French pronunciation of 'A'), that is an 'ehr-r' ('R') " The rest of the film revolves around the mobsters' frantic efforts to recover the images that have already been sold.
     To make language even more difficult, translators are often plagued by the changing meaning of words over past centuries since a manuscript was written, perhaps in a different part of the world. As an example, "gay" used to mean happy.  Centuries ago, to "prevent" something meant simply "to happen before it." But as words gradually change, prevent now means to stop it from happening at all.
    And finally, where you come from sometimes alters the meaning. A State Highway  Patrol officer stopped a car bearing a Georgia license When the driver rolled down his window, the trooper asked him, "Do you have any ID?" The driver looked puzzled. "Bout whut?"
      So when you write, go back over your manuscript not only for misspelling, but for alternative meanings.