Ha, people in the US should know what a cash machine is. It may have been the accent, but I’m having a hard time imagining how even the most severe British accent would make “cash machine” that hard to understand. Now if you were Scottish, on the other hand…
Virtually a BBC accent, so who knows? A bit later in Texas I had trouble ordering a tuna sandwich because of the stark difference between "tooona" (US) and "tyouna" (UK). To be fair they're very different sounds.
The first time I was introduced to a Glaswegian colleague I just smiled and nodded because I had not the faintest idea what he was saying (the ear tunes in pretty quickly though).
Yeah, the ew sound isn't commonly understood - try asking for a Mountain Dew. I've been visiting America for 20 years and I still can't get people to understand what I want to drink.
Which means Americans have homophones that are not homophones in other variants of English. Leading to, for example, confusion over whether someone should "make do" or "make due". In British English, there is no ambiguity, and one makes do
