Well, in that case it came at one point to the prosecution asking Louise Woowdard about a meeting that had been held with the parents - and he asked something like "was it a regular meeting" and she said yes it was.

And he went on about it not being "a regular meeting" and she said it was - and it was clear to people watching it over here that she was using regular in the normal English sense, in which a meeting that takes place every other Tuesday or whatever is "a regular meeting", and he was using it in American English where a regular meeting means one which isn't unusual in any way, ie not one where there's a chance you might get the sack. And the effect of this clear misunderstanding was to make Louise look as if she was being evasive and dishonest, since it wasn't a regular meeting in the American sense.

As for "pop" - well there was a bit where the police witness had said that Louise had said she dropped the child down, and she said no, she'd said she placed him down - and then in the witness box she said maybe she said she "popped him down".

And the prosecutor made a big play with the word as being an odd kind of word, and implying a degree of force. But of course in England it doesn't, it's what anybody would say when they were talking about putting a child into a cot, and just doesn't have those kind of implications. And the net effect once again was to give an impression of evasiveness and dishonesty.

The thing was, these weren't the kind of words where people are sort of aware of differences in meaning and emphasis. They were ordinary day-to-day words - "regular" you might say in american. An English lawyer and judge and jury might well have picked it up, given the amount of American TV and films they've all been expopsed to, but it seemed pretty evident that noone in that court seemed to be picking it up, including the defence.