Happy New Year everyone.

To add fuel to the fire: I once did an international review on the mastery of the English language within my former employer's international hubs. Turned out that most employees found one country the most difficult to understand... The Brits. It was because they tend to stick to their regional accents and because they use a lot of local references and expressions that are not recognised even by the most fluent English speaking non-Brits. It is a great problem in business and I have been told that the Brits deliberately use their mastery of what they see as the Queen's English to deliberately confuse non-native English speakers. The latter included Americans. ;-)