In the US it's a pretty hateful word. My ex used it a lot in my direction so I'm extra sensitive to it. That being said, I've heard Australians use it and the tone is different so it doesn't seem as troublesome.

I've been programming professionally for 15 years and I've never used cnt for count and I don't recall ever seeing it abbreviated as such anywhere either. If I want to count something, I'll generally use something like numItems. I now know who wrote the code and I'm certain he wasn't trying to be funny with it, so it's all good now.