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Part 1 of Cross-cultural communication conundrums ("It's a slam dunk!")

A US-based colleague of mine whom I'd had the recent pleasure to meet, spoke to my immediate team about working effectively across various cultures. The basketball expression "it's a slam dunk!" was, in his experience, as bewildering to his overseas colleagues as what we might consider to be less esoteric expressions, like "no kidding". This prompted me to consider what lessons I'd learned in my position as a thrice ex-patriated person with a working knowledge of Japanese and French (and now challenged with Austrian German). In Ireland, it took me a surprisingly long time to truly understand Hiberno-English. Never mind the phonetic shifts (aka "accent"); even transcribed, common interjections and vocabulary can quickly mystify the non-initiated. Take this example sentence which artificially conflates a lot of native (Dublin centric) expressions: "Oh be the hokie: my laptop was banjaxed. I felt so knackered after trying