Well, yes, it can mean one of those, but in common parlance it just means dessert.
And serving a steamed pudding with chocolate cream would get some strange looks: hot custard’s the thing for a pud.
Do we not use this phrase in the US? I know I use this phrase all the time, but my English has gotten cross-pollinated over the years, so I may have picked this up from my British friends. I know this has happened to me before using what I thought was an American phrase, and it turns out to be something I picked up along the way.
You might also be amused to learn that in pro baseball, pitchers use a rubber strip embedded in the pitcher’s mound to position themselves correctly.
“Put your foot on the rubber” was always good for Beavis and Butt-Head type laughs in junior high gym class. Huh-huh! Huh-huh!
That wuz cool. 
I don’t recall hearing it until I was teaching EFL in Moscow in the '90s and had a friend from Canterbury who used it.
I don’t think I ever encountered it even in the 14 months I spent in Britain in the '70s. Maybe I was just consorting with more genteel people back then… :o
Oh, actually that reminds me, a “squash” in UK English can also have another meaning of a type of fruit drink concentrate/syrup. You’ll find a bunch of different squashes at the local Tesco. (That said, context usually prevents you from confusing what is meant by “squash” when someone asks you to pick up a bottle of orange squash at the store.)
Speaking of lemon squash, has “lemonade” been mentioned yet? In the US, it is an uncarbonated drink of lemon, sugar, and water. In the UK, it’s a sweetened carbonated drink of lemon, sugar, and water. (At least every time I’ve ever had it there, it exclusively meant the carbonated drink. Wikipedia seems to say that American lemonade is also known as “traditional lemonade” in the UK.)
I use it all the time, but like you, probably cross-pollination with Brit-Speak.
No, very interesting to me as well, since I lived in Poland a few years ago, and while my Polish was never good and I’ve also forgotten a large part of it now that I don’t live there anymore, I did notice some of these false friends with other Slavic languages.
On the other hand, I believe Russian uses the Latin words for the months, is this correct? Which is interesting, since when it comes to people’s given names, Polish (and other Catholic or Protestant Slavic countries) tends to use Latin names, while Russia, an Orthodox country, prefers names of Greek origin.
I’ve heard this in Canada as well.
Yes, this is right. There are archaic Russian words for them, though. I’m going to look this up, so the following information is not off the top of my head:
It looks like of the Slavic languages that still use the descriptive names, we have: Belarussian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Sorbian, and Ukrainian. And here’s the Wikipedia article on it.
People around my age might remember our grandparents referring to overshoes as rubbers.
Are you sure you didn’t order a peperoncino pizza. A peperoncino is a type of banana pepper.
Peperoncino - Wikipedia
From this article :
In many countries, this kind of pizza is indeed called a “peperoni” pizza. Note the single ‘p’, unlike the “pepperoni” pizza which is common in North America and has meat as one of its toppings.
As noted in the routine, in other English speaking countries diapers are called “napkins” as well as the shortened form “nappies.” I got confused looks sometimes in NZ when I asked for napkins in a restaurant before I learned to call them serviettes.
One that I don’t think has been mentioned yet is “knickers” for women’s panties, although that’s probably well enough known in the US from Monty Python etc.
Yes, quite common in my experience traveling, not just Germany. Peperone just means peppers in Italian.
I had a head scratchy moment a bit ago when BBC followed up Back In Time For Dinner with Back In Time For Tea, which is specific to Northern England. I was so used to “tea” being a little four o’clock nibble meal in UK parlance that it threw me to find out that in the north “tea” is the main evening meal. And mostly really boring food too, historically speaking. Northern England definitely has a different culture, ethic and wealth level than the south–never really knew that, but it explains a lot.
What “can”? The name literally means sailor sauce or sailor’s sauce, it’s Italian.
One English noun that causes unexpected problems in international settings is corn. The ambiguity leads to food companies always using either wheat or maize for internal comunication; if they use the term “corn” at all, it is for external comunication with clients who prefer it that way.
They might also be called totes, after a popular brand name. The big ones that go up over your ankles and fasten with some kind of snap or clasp were called golashes when I was growing up.
In the US, it’s usually just tomato sauce.
The video game “The Stanley Parable” has a snarky British narrator who talks about doing nothing, and calls it “doing sweet F. A.”
What, then, is a vegetable marrow?
Crib is also a US slang term for the house you live in.