Without or Less

Caso ( example ) or Cazzo ( four letter word), any body who is not familiar with Italian language can easily make this slip up. Yes Pope also did it. In his weekly blessing. Since it is Pope who made that mistake, though he quickly corrected it himself, it went viral on the YouTube with no time.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/03/03/285271511/pope-francis-lets-a-vulgarity-slip-during-vatican-address

I hail from south west state of India and I can pronounce pizza as "pisa" only! I will never ever ask for pizza verbally in any restaurant, if I visit Italy. It may sound to them like "pisa" and I might be up for a surprise. It could be a pizza with topping of mix of animals that include hog, alligator, frog legs, and even python. Your reaction would be another four letter word, "yuck", mine was the same when I read this. But yes, it is happening not in Italy, but in Fort Myers, Florida for sure !
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/slice-bites-florida-pizzeria-sells-python-pizza-article-1.1571074

Language if not used correctly can lead to confusion and embarrassment. It can just be a slip up or it can be a wrong usage. Or it can be some thing not used in that particular way in that geography. Or it can be an error while sincerely translating from one's mother-tongue to another language. English is no different, actually more prone to this.

This was way back in the 90s. All IT companies in India were struggling, less work was getting outsourced. One would see only benches all over the place. Though pink slip was not heard of in this part of the world, we all were worried. To cut costs, my company decided to have shifts. 7AM to 3:30PM, morning shift. 3:30PM to 12 midnight evening shift. We were in a meeting called by Chandra, our manager to explain the modalities. Swetha, one of the ladies asked "what about transport, especially for ladies like us when we come in the evening shift, will we get dropped till door step?". Chandra as such notorious for his English just replied "Why up to door step ya, they will take you to bedroom itself" !!

This was my second day in customer office in Singapore. I got an email from Ban Lee, "Johny Nai and Jessica Koon are getting married on March 12". It was sent to a group, of which I was also part of. Congratulatory emails poured in from many quarters, especially from the counterparts in the US. "Johny & Jessica, wish you a happy married life", "live long happily", "you make a perfect couple" et all. I knew Johny was a manager in customer services and Jessica was in the IT team. As I hadn't seen these people at all to provide any expert advice, I chose not to send my wishes. 

Shortly another email came from Ban Lee. "Sorry for the confusion. Actually  Johnny and Jessica are getting married to different people, not each other"! I fully sympathize with Ban Lee. She did say that they were getting married in the first place, but she never said it was each other. She was not explicit enough, any thing wrong with that !

Xavier Chapius from Paris visited us in Bangalore, our customer manager. He was so impressed with one of our technical write ups on IEF, the state of the art software those days to automate design and code generation. I promised him to send a softcopy to his emai id. I totally forgot about that. A week went by. Xavier sent me an email "Shenoy, it was a good trip. thanks for sending me the softcopy of the write up". I didn't remember sending one to him, I thought somebody in the team would have sent. I replied to him with return "thanks". Another week went by. Xavier forwarded the original email to me again as a reminder - "Shenoy, it was a good trip. thanks for sending me the soft copy of the write up". I knew some thing was wrong here. Went to my boss who had good experience in handling European customers. Then only I realized that Xavier was "thanking me in advance" in anticipation of  me sending the write up! I wished I had known this usage in advance !!

In a coffee lounge at Chicago airport, I repeated five times "without milk", still the man at the counter did not understand fully. He had a hunch as what I was asking for and confirmed "with no cream?", though I did not understand what he meant, I just agreed to it - not to have any further confusion. I was ready to drink any thing !!!!

If you go to Cochin, you need to ask for a "without" tea. It means without (sugar) tea, sugar being silent and therefore absent in the tea. But in Bangalore, you need to tell a  "less" tea. It means (sugar)less tea, again sugar being silent and therefore absent in the tea. Both would taste similar though, utterly bitterly liquid !

I am sure you would know many more differences like this. It would always be better to know more of these to avoid any confusion or embarrassment !

Bye. Cheers. au revoir. Al vida.