Unfortunately a common language is of very little use to illiterates.  Too many engineers today cannot communicate in complete sentences - either verbally or in writing, let alone speak a common technical language.  Several years ago, a licensed PE working for Federal Highways demanded that my office enforce exact placement of concrete reinforcement based on their measurement of elements in a drawing that was clearly marked "Not to Scale" and where the only dimension given was a minimum depth of cover. 

When a second PE working for my agency concurred with the Fed's determination, I inquired about tolerances for deviation.  I was told that we were to accept "zero" tolerance.  I inquired futher as to what was meant by zero.  The engineer looked at me quizzically and asked what did I mean.  I explained about standard tolerances and said that we needed to define zero in terms of the number of significant digits we wanted to use to define the tolerance.  The engineer got very red in the face, slammed their fists onto the conference table and screamed that "zero meant zero".  So we interpreted that to mean that they wanted 0" giving us a standard tolerance of +/- 0.5" where the previous defined tolerance for these units was .25" -going to show that you get what you pay for all around.