bovvered means bothered. here’s an explanation.

It’s a cockney pronunciation. A cockney is a person born within the hearing distance of the bells of Bow church,a district of London. Everyone likes to think they are a cockney when in fact they are not.

Cockneys tend to use double v instead of th as in muvver or bruvver instead of mother or brother. In the 60′s there was a cockney skiffle/rock n roll band called Joe Brown and his bruvvers.

Chips and fries -I have found while here in Texas they are two different things unless buying fish and chips (which very often means you still get those horrible fries). Potato chips are British crisps.

Another word that Brits and Americans use is Jock. In the UK, a Jock is a Scotsman ( originally a form of John) in the US, it refers to an athlete usually football – which could lead to a whole new thread about sports and their variations.

And there is no doubt that your loss of our “bum” has impoverished you:

The last couplet of Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale provides a perfect end to the story, combining as it does a terse summary of the final situation and a pious wish which we may all share.
In a modern translation by an Englishman it goes:
“Now Nicholas is branded on the bum
And God take all of us to Kingdom come.”

And see what a modern American translation has done with it:
“And Nicholas is branded on the butt.
This tale is done, and God save all the rout!”

Lamentable!

As for “behind”, of course we have no trouble with it as a preposition, though we do like “in back of” as well. Note that “in back of” is parallel to “in front of”, which is transatlantic.

As for “ass”, in the 19th century United States a lot of words lacked “r” between “a” and “s”. This is quite distinct from the later process by which most English dialects lost “r” after all vowels, and probably reflects an earlier change that affected the English rural dialects but not the standard language.

Much of this change has been undone: we no longer say “hoss” for “horse” or “skasely” for “scarcely”, as we did in Mark Twain’s time. But we still have “bust” (now a separate verb from its parent, “burst”), “passel” (meaning a large quantity of something) from “parcel”, and “cuss” from “curse”.

Also, chips are not fries nor vice versa. There is a restaurant not half a mile from my house in NYC where chips may be bought, and they are large and bar-shaped, rather than small and rod-shaped like fries.

The nearest analogue of toad-in-the-hole is possibly pigs-in-a-blanket, which are sausages (usually hot dogs) wrapped in a crescent roll and baked. Yorkshire pudding in America takes the form of the popover, which is basically a miniature Yorkshire pudding baked in a custard cup.

Everyone knows that the Englishman’s bum is the American’s hobo, and the American’s butt is the Englishman’s thing they have for collecting rainwater or storing Malmsey. Also, I am told that behind is so closely associated in America with butts that it is rarely used to denote the position of one thing relative to another and they have to say “Get thee in back of me, Satan”.

Englishmen have no such problem; we happily use the word in both senses and it is hard to imagine a context in which this could cause misunderstanding.

But when we come to ass/arse the position is more complicated. Americans have only the first word and pronounce it the same whether it is the animal or the other thing. We used to have the two words meaning different things which were pronounced and spelt differently. This meant that one could call someone a silly ass (short “a”) which was a very mild and respectable way of telling him he was foolish. But inconsistency and confusion crept in long ago; in the fifties one of our serious newspapers noted on one page that the cricket authorities had been accused of assing about with the selection for the next Test match while on another page in the same issue Britain was said to have kicked the debtor nations up the arse.

My own feeling is that Englishmen of taste and refinement prefer the longer word, but, sadly, American influence has meant that it is now falling out of use.