It started innocently enough.
“I’ve ordered us a couple of converters from English to Chinese. They will arrive by the time we land in Beijing.”
We are heading away and we couldn’t find our international plug converters. Both of us have packed them away somewhere that seemed sensible at the time but long since forgotten. Too late to pick something up before we left, Alicia ordered a couple to be delivered on arrival in Beijing.
Confused, I instantly assumed she’d ordered the wrong thing.
“But we want Chinese to English, we are going to China.”
We looked at each other puzzled before trying to describe what we were referring to; a converter to allow us to use a UK plug in a Chinese wall socket. Of course Alicia had ordered the right thing it just turns out that we have a different frame of reference when using the terms ‘from’ and ’to’.
I have exactly the same issue with ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ as relates to computer systems. I can never remember which is closer to the user and which is closest to the data they are working with.