Idioms by Synonyms

I am a native English speaker and I'm pretty sure this is the only place I've ever seen "samovar" is here.

I have only heard 'Touch wood', I am a kiwi/Brit.

Well they must have crossed the pond, and then another bit of water, cause I have heard of them here in the netherlands :P I mean the sweating bullets and happy as a clamb one.

I think both people from the US aswell as people from the UK do not get exposed much to "the other" english. I have noticed it a lot. That one or the other group havent heard of things which even for me as a non-english speaker feel like common knowledge. I guess your own cultures produce enough that you don't need to see stuff from other people :P Plus maybe a bit of pride? We dont need UK/US stuff, we allready got our US/UK stuff.

Over here we sort of get exposed equally to UK and US stuff. Movies are more from the US quizshows and murder mysteries are from the UK , (ow and antique and nature, ow wait that is the on BBC itself, we cant get any american channels though) There arent too many on, but I think sitcoms were more from the US aswell (though that was more the case in the 90s)

I've never heard it in the UK. I have heard sweating buckets though.

Because gems -- diamonds in particular -- are monopolized by a few large companies who hoard them to create an artificial scarcity. For a long time, De Beers controlled around 90% of the world's rough diamond trade, so they could charge whatever they want. De Beers isn't the only powerful company around now, but they all still stockpile diamonds and sell them off slowly, because they realize that if any of them start selling diamonds at a rate similar to the rate they're actually mined at, the market would be flooded and the whole thing would fall apart.

And of course then there's their marketing, which wholesale created the idea that a diamond is a symbol of love and marriage. Hell, "A diamond is forever" isn't even an idiom, not really. It's a slogan De Beers created in the 1940s.