[robocat]

I am a New Zealander, and a common difficulty with visitors is the difference between “can’t” and “cunt”. The vowel has exactly the same sound, but it is long for can’t, and short for cunt. Can uses a different vowel sound from can’t, which means we can misunderstand Americans who don’t pronounce the t in can’t properly. Fortunately we can usually pick that a tourist using the word cunt usually means can’t. It is especially difficult for some people, because they don’t naturally understand vowel length changes. In Māori and Latin vowel length is critical to differentiate words.

Kiwis often understand both British and American usages of words, for example calling something “completely pants” makes sense to me. Pissed can be used in either a British or American sense.

I have only ever heard of nonce in the software engineering sense, and never in the perverse sense (and I have a much wider vocabulary than most).

Pants here means trousers, following the American usage.

Usage of some individual Māori words within an otherwise English sentence is becoming more common here (cultural pride versus historical cringe), but I would expect most kiwis avoid using them if speaking to a tourist.

[Archelaos]

I have always found it a bit immature that English or American philosophers shy away from pronouncing the name of Immanuel Kant correctly.

[layer8]

That reminds me how (Immanuel) Kant is correctly pronounced like "cunt" (in German) but English speakers pronounce it like "can't".