No, it's not just cultural. At times, single words can be a problem. I came across one yesterday. Apparently, in the tech industry in the UK, they speak about "shifting" products. In US English, we would say "shipping" or "moving," for the number of units of a product that is sent to stores but not yet sold.
I have been watching the TV series Ashes to Ashes recently. The very last line was: “A word in your shell-like, pal." I had absolutely no idea what this meant, and even when watching, had to go back and turn the subtitles on to even understand what words they were.
Two examples don't make a trend, but I don't think these count anyway. Cockney rhyming slang has a local cultural basis, and gives many Brits problems as well, though "shell-like" is one of those that seems well known.
And in the case of shift, the meaning you attribute is either wrong or unusual or it's a usage unfamiliar to at least this Brit. Shifting products in normal usage just means selling, though is restricted to people like shopkeepers, so is again part of a local culture (commerce). E.g. "Christmas shopping really began today - I shifted 20 new plasma TVs at a grand apiece." If it's a wholesaler passing goods on to a retailer, the idea is still selling, to my shell-like.
I was teaching one of my grandsons his first rhyming slang words the other day. It was interesting how he found some very easy (apples and pears for stairs), some were easy but ambiguous (mince pies, pork pies) and some left him bemused even when explained (butcher's hook, trouble and strife). I didn't try him on things like boatrace, and certainly not berk, but this language is still alive and evolving. The famous show Minder had lots of new examples.
Other countries have equivalents, and they are nearly always meant to be a secret language. Japanese gangsters like to reverse syllables (do-sa for sa-do, i.e. exile), and a few examples have crept into go and shogi.
Going off a slight tangent (but still grumpiness), I tried a new US show yesterday called Bones. It was very slick and funny, but it had one feature that I find very annoying. In the same way that a go board (or chess board) often crops up in tv shows as a cipher for "this person is very intelligent", there seems to be a similar item in the American manual of standard acting techiques which clearly recommends speaking very fast to show you are intelligent. Since I find it hard enough to hear anyway, this is intensely irritating to me for that reason alone, but also it doesn't correspond with my experience of real life - even brainy people hum and haw, and if they do speak at high speed they are apt to be regarded as too clever here (i.e. potential nutters). In contrast, the upper class British gent educated at Oxbridge may speak with an exaggerated drawl to signify his origins and education (and that's pretty irritating, too).
Criminal Minds was a program that featured both a go board as a big-brain cipher and actors speaking supernaturally smoothly and fast - and I hated it, even though I'm usually a sucker for cop shows (The Wire is why I went to Baltimore).
