Coffee vs. Espresso (or cultural perspectives vs. post-modern deconstructionism)

When you travel outside your home culture (whether it's a few states over or across the globe), you  find many differences in interpretation.  When we first moved to Idaho, we were thoroughly amused that every type of vehicle (even our Dodge Neon) was referred to as a "rig."  Wait--isn't a rig an eighteen wheeler? Anyway...

We had been warned of the disparities between French coffee and American coffee, so we knew that ordering a cup of coffee wouldn't result in a large mug of drip coffee like we have each morning at home.  Our first meal in Europe was at a creperie in Geneva, and we decided to go for the fully authentic experience.  Here was our coffee:  a double shot of espresso, straight up.

We discuss this concept with our kids a lot--that is, the idea that people can have completely differing definitions for the same word.  Not just cross-culturally, but even just the variations of our mental processing produce all kinds of unique interpretations.  When Eika and Henry were about 5 and 3 years old, respectively, they had a prolonged argument about whether a vase of flowers was real.  For Henry, who was beginning to explore "real vs. make-believe" insisted that these flowers were indeed real because he could see them and touch them.  They existed!  Eika, on the other hand, stood her ground that they were not one bit real; she defined real as the Velveteen Rabbit would have.  These flowers were merely an imitation of the real thing because they were made of plastic and fabric. 

So how do we acknowledge this without spiraling into an amoral, deconstructionist, post-modern understanding of Truth?  While I do believe that there are endless applications of The Truth, and those applications have a whole slew of different forms and faces, I still believe in an Ultimate Truth. I could ramble on, but as I don't particularly have any answers at this moment, I will leave you to ruminate on the question as well.