Before a piece of journalism is published in a magazine or newspaper, it usually undergoes one or several rounds of edits, designed to make its arguments more forceful, its narrative more compelling, its language more unified, or its spelling and grammar more accurate. Occasionally, due to some small ignorance or misunderstanding about a writer’s meaning, an editor will make a change that has precisely the opposite of this clarifying effect. If you’ve read the headline on this post and know anything about the standard versus metric systems of measurement, you may already know where I’m going with this.