My personal experience is that I just translate one idiom from one language / culture to the other without realising and still expect ppl. to know what I mean.

That often works in my experience, and can lead to funny moments

Even without considering cheese villages (somebody mentioned Roquefort, I was thinking of Gruyere, France clocking in at about 100 inhabitants), I believe Verdun would be just as known and is smaller at a population of around 17000.

For a group our size (we regularly have over 800 people on our mumble, peak is somewhere around the 1.3k mark if I remember correctly), it would also be very cost prohibitive to use TS