>Unknown to Americans, "Berkshire" is pronounced: Barkšir, "clerk" - clark, and a few others like that.

I've given up. Throw in an Ozzie for good measure, and you get pretty much the situation with the Chinese group of languages, where they all pronounce words in their own way, but have the written language in common :).

>>Speaking of puns you just can't resist, yesterday my daughter came from school with a thing from grammar she couldn't possibly understand. So what was it, I asked. "Principal part, I have no idea what that could be". "That's when you stage a play in the school, the big school manager's role". "That's what I thought too, but it isn't."
>
>We avoid this perrenial problem by calling the school boss the "Head Teacher".

I assume the Amers (as we call them) just must have a different word, as a matter of principle. Which they usually misspell as principal, and principal as principle.