One thing that continually seems to cause confusion and mismatch of expectations is the identity and composition of: Crumpets and Muffins.
I’ll get to the confusions in a moment, but first, descriptions:
In England (at least, in the south of England, where I live):
Muffins are like a flattish, dense-textured bread roll; they are most usually split (either by slicing them or by poking a fork into the edges all the way around and pulling them in half - which I think yields a far superior rough-ish surface for toasting and retention of butter and toppings) - the internal structure of one of these muffins is that of bread - somewhat similar in density of crumb to that of a bagel.
There are also muffins that are basically a big, soft, sweet cupcake, which may have chocolate chips, fruit, or other things mixed into them before baking.
There are also other things that are called muffins - for example oven-bottom muffins, which are like a large soft bread roll, often with a well-toasted top crust and with an internal texture that is soft, fluffy-yet-moist white bread.
Crumpets are like a very thick pancake, made from a very bubbly, yeasted, unsweetened bread batter, cooked in a poachette ring or similar, on a hot surface, so that the bottom surface is smooth and well-toasted, and the bubbles that rise during cooking burst open on the top surface to form a dense pattern of open holes, into which butter and other toppings can be melted and spread after the crumpet is toasted. The texture is kind of rubbery before toasting, becoming softer once they are hot. Crumpets are toasted whole, without needing to be split.
Crumpets in other parts of this land are, I understand, sometimes larger and flatter than the ones I typically see (the larger, flatter variety is sometimes sold here as ‘pikelets’)
Here are some examples of the confused questions I have experienced from across the pond:
How do you cope with two completely different things being called muffins? Isn’t that terribly confusing? (no, it’s fine, in fact both of our dialects of English do that sort of thing all the time - you just tend to notice the weirdness of it more in a foreign dialect than a familiar one)
Muffins in England are the same as the thing called English Muffins in the USA (not exactly, as far as I can tell - as I understand it, ‘English muffins’ in the USA often have a more open and bubbly internal texture than ‘muffins’ in England do, but this might vary from brand to brand)
Crumpets in England are the same as English Muffins in the USA (not as far as I can tell. The open, bubbly texture might be similar, but crumpets are a thick, unsweetened, rubbery pancake that has holes in the top, and crumpets are never split in half - they are toasted as-is)
Muffins didn’t exist in England until after ‘English Muffins’ were invented in America, then the idea was adopted in England and sold as just ‘muffins’, sometime in the 20th century[some people assert the 1980s] (this has to be bogus. ‘Muffin’, historically, used to be a much more generic term than it is today, referring to any of a fairly wide range of single-portion bread-cake type things. There are recipes for ‘muffins’ that pre-date the 20th century, and it’s obvious from just reading these recipes without making them, that they’re talking about something fairly similar).
