Originally Posted by
BobbyG
In the States, the grassy part that divides a highway is the "median". In England it's the "central reservation", or at least was.
What we call "roundabouts" in the US, the Brits call "rotaries".
And a few months ago I was listening to a podcast and the international panelists were discusting things related to the body''s "skeletal" system. The Yanks pronounced it "SKEH-luh-tull", their UK counterparts pronounced it "skuh-LEE-tahl".
Oh yeah, then there's the "SKED-jew-wull"/"SHED-jool" Yank/Brit thing.
I've always referred to the grassy median dividing a street as a 'boulevard strip'.
Another is referring to fuel for a vehicle as gasoline or diesel in the USA, 'petrol' in the UK. The hood on a car is a 'bonnet' in the U.K. I'm not sure what either of them is in Australia.
I've heard Aussies refer to an outhouse as a 'thunderbox'.
Japan has some interesting pronunciations, too. Remember the Japanese town with the nuclear reactor that got wiped out by the Tsunami in 2011? In the USA its referred to as Fu-ku-SHI-ma, over in Japan its Fu-KU-shima.