In the story, the protagonists—a team of human scientists and diplomats—successfully organized a meeting with the leaders of an alien race. Both parties were very excited to finally be communicating face-to-face. Originally, the humans had taken the pains to learn the aliens' language in order to initiate contact. The more formal meeting required the aliens to learn a human language as well. After collecting a comprehensive linguistic database, the humans transmitted it to the aliens, saying that they could choose any language to learn—their translator android spoke most common languages fluently.

The aliens decided to learn the language closest in semantics and pronunciation to their own—which happened to be Welsh. Unfortunately, the translator android had not learned Welsh (it's not exactly commonly-spoken), and the meeting had to be postponed for a couple weeks while the humans found a person who both was willing to interact with aliens, and who spoke fluent Welsh.