In Russia, cannabis was measured in "matchboxes" (around the amount that gets in to a small ziploc) and "glasses", where glass is a 220ml glass Russians drink vodka from in the movies.
So it goes full circle when you start measuring cannabis in glasses, sounds really American!
You might be right, I think I got annoyed with fluid ounces in cups in a recipe with flour also measured in cups, and some other random third measurement.
No word of a lie, one of my university roommates came up to be the first week we were living together with a drinking glass in his hand and asked me if it was what a recipe meant when it said "add a cup of water."
I get the rocket and coriander ones, also the units of measurement but what do you call a bell pepper? (Also how do you differentiate dried cilantro seed powder from the fresh herb? I like to know if I should be using a spice or the fresh plant)
Cilantro is the herb, coriander (seed) is the spice/dried powder. Often you can tell by what you are making and how it's being used/added, but typically they are differentiated as above in American recipes.
Genuinely confused as well about the pepper, a bell pepper is a pretty universal name for it as far as I knew. Folks also refer to them as green/yellow/red peppers here, or sweet peppers occasionally (usually when used in Italian food), but bell pepper is the generic name.
In a whole load of languages, you call bell pepper paprika. If you just say "pepper" to me, that's usually black pepper in particular. If you say chilli pepper, that means a spicy variant of the capsicum genus. A non-spicy capsicum genus member? That's a paprika.
There's no name to put in front of "pepper" in my language that would make it refer to paprika.
That said, in English, it's apparently almost always something something pepper. Or capsicum. Or apparently according to Wikipedia, in the American mid-west, mango???????
Aeons ago Cracked did a skit called "Cooking with Babelfish." First of all remember when it was called Babelfish? Remember Alta Vista?
The one thing you could count on with one of those...feels wrong to call it 'old'...translation algorithm programs was it would get the quantities right. It might tell you to put in 5 kilograms of earth apples, because the French don't have a word for "potato" and Babelfish didn't know that, but the recipe did indeed call for 5 kilograms of them.