I'm in the US at the moment, where two of my nephews have recently finished (mostly now AmE in this sense) high school. That is to say, they (AmE) graduated from high school. Though their graduation ceremonies were in June, they are still in the midst of graduation party season—and we arrived in time to attend one of those parties. Invitations are extended to extended family, family friends, the graduate's classmates/friends and their nuclear families. And all family units who attend will bring a gift for the graduate. Back when I graduated, these were mostly presents you could unwrap. Dictionaries were common graduation gifts, and I recall getting a  cookbook (orig. more AmE, vs BrE cookery book) and things for my (AmE) dorm room. I also got two handmade dolls, meant to represent me as a graduate—and since I'm at my childhood home, you get to see them. They're looking pretty good at 41 years old.

These days, graduation presents mostly come in envelopes. My first stop on this US trip was at the bank, to get some crisp (AmE) bills/(BrE) banknotes to slip into cards for the two nephews as well my niece, who has a freshly minted BSc in Economics. (If you've read The Prodigal Tongue, you've met her before. She was the niece who had things to say about British bacon.) 

High school graduation parties are generally not held in England—partly because there one does not graduate from high school. Graduation is only for those who get a degree from a university. But even when people graduate with a degree, family parties like this are not common. Generally, Americans do a lot more of this kind of party-throwing and gift-giving to mark life transitions (and help out a bit). See the earlier post about showers. 

Meanwhile, my 16-year-old (aka Grover) has recently finished secondary school in England. (Her secondary school, as it happens and unusually for England, has high school in its name.) Before school finished, she took 27 exams over 6 weeks in 9 subjects—this is what's known as the GCSEs (General Certificate[s] of Secondary Education). (NB: Many of the educational issues that come up here have been described in previous blog posts—rather than clicking on each link here, you might want to save your efforts for the 'related posts' links below.) Grover won't know her results in those exams till late August, when she'll be able to enrol(l) in the sixth-form college that's accepted her. (Though she's accepted to the college, she won't know until she has her exam results whether she's met the prerequisites for the A-level subjects she's chosen.) 

Her status has been difficult to explain to her American family. Sixth-form college is not what Americans think of as college, which would be called university in BrE. In England, sixth-form (and many other diverse things!) counts as further education—after secondary school, but not degree-level study. In an effort to translate her status, she's started telling Americans that she's graduated. Her reasoning for this is that (a) they had a little ceremony in an assembly on their last day of school, (b) she's going to something called college, and (c) she's had a prom (an imitation of the American tradition for these younger students). But since she doesn't even know whether she's passed her exams,* it can't really be counted as "graduating", can it? I have suggested to her that she may be misrepresenting her situation. She doesn't mind. It might yet pay off...

What she is, in Britain, is a school leaver. Instead of getting a mortar board and gown, she got a (orig. BrE) hoodie. (Pic here from an Etsy shop. Grover's hoodie is back in Brighton.)

*Oh, I'm sure she's passed. Whether she's got the prerequisite grades is another matter, so it's all a bit stressful. 

PS: While on this holiday, I have missed the University of Sussex graduation. I usually go, but since Grover's school ended early this year, we took advantage of being able to travel before the prices go insane during the (BrE) school holidays. (As Paul in the comments section notes, GCSE students just stop going to school after their last exam—it's very anticlimatic, but it got G out of school about a month earlier than usual. We hung around for the prom in early July.)

So, I want to say: Congratulations to our BA English Language and Linguistics and BA English Language and Literature graduates of 2024! Here's the outfit you didn't get to see me wear.

Related posts:

Types of schools and school years 
(the one that's linked-to a LOT above!)

2021 UK-to-US Word of the Year: university

Academic titles and address

And lots of others with the Education label

I've just found a bunch of research on my computer about conflab. I can't remember why I saved a bunch of corpus results on it, but maybe it was season/series 5 of Succession that brought it to my attention, when an Australian actress playing an Anglo-American rich person said it in dialog(ue) written by a rather British writing team:

I knew the word confab, a shortening of confabulation, and I'm pretty sure I'd heard conflab before and dismissed it as a speech error. This time, I did the responsible thing and looked it up. It's not a speech error.

Confabulation came into English in the 15th century from Latin, meaning 'a conversation'. (In the 20th century, it acquired a psychiatric meaning: 'a hallucination of a memory'. That newer meaning is irrelevant to the abbreviated forms I'm discussing here.) A confab is a conversation, an argument, or (in a later development) a conference or the like. It's an informal word, as clippings often are, and sounds a bit jokey—but it's surprisingly old.  (Surprising to me, at least.) The first OED citation is a British one from 1701. The second is from Thomas Jefferson in 1763, so it was not unknown in America back then. Green's Dictionary of Slang has a few more British examples from the 18th century:

The OED marks conflab as 'chiefly U.S.', with its first citation being from Kansas in 1873:
Green marks it as American as well. His 1843 example is from a book published in Philadelphia. BUT before the 1873 Kansas citation, he has who British ones:

So is conflab an Americanism?  Well, whatever its origin, it is more British now.  

I have been asked many times if I've written about stodgy, and I always think I have, because I wrote a post about other BrE -odgy adjectives. I have no idea why stodgy didn't make it into that post, but I'm here to rectify the stodgelessness of this blog.

I remember (early in my time in England) asking an English friend what she meant when she said she looked forward to a bit of stodge. She meant 'a carbohydrate-heavy meal'. It was new to me, and this chart from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) lets you know why: most Americans don't talk about stodge:

stodge in the GloWbE corpus

But stodgy is a different matter:

stodgy in the GloWbE corpus

So how could I not figure out from context what stodge meant, if stodgy be a relatively common word in AmE?

Because Americans typically don't use stodgy to mean 'carb-heavy'.  We mostly use it to refer to someone or something that is so conventional or inactive as to be dull. You can see this in the typical nouns following stodgy in the News on the Web corpus. Here are the top 3:

	BrE	AmE
1	stodgy food	stodgy industry
2	stodgy performance	stodgy incumbents
3	stodgy comfort food	stodgy reputation

    

Stodgy performance (in sport[s]) in the BrE column shows that it can also mean 'dull' in the UK. It's a negative thing when it comes to things other than food, and it can be negative regarding food too. You might feel unpleasantly heavy after eating stodgy food. But stodgy food can also be nice, as I know all too well.

Claggy reminds me a bit of stodgy, and it came up recently when I baked some banana bread for a gathering then overheard a participant describe it as claggy. This again, is a BrEism, which might have become somewhat familiar in the US due to the popularity of the Great British Bake Off (aka the Great British Baking Show: see this old post about that). It means 'having a tendency to clot'—so when it is used in reference to baked goods, it means something like 'so moist or undercooked as to feel gummy or clumpy'. 

Inspired by Anatoly Liberman's Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms (which I've reviewed for the International Journal of Lexicography), here's a quick dip into some ways of saying one's going to bed, where they've come from and who uses them now.

to Bedfordshire

Hit the hay

In 2009, my parents came over from the US and we took a trip to Italy: Florence, Pisa, and Rome. The food, of course, was gorgeous, but often clashed with what my mother thought of as "Italian" food—the type that one gets in the northeastern US, where Italian immigrants brought over a lot of southern Italian dishes, which were then adapted as tastes and ingredients changed. Because of this, she repeatedly asked "Is it in a red sauce?" Many of the waiters found this a strange question, but they could deal with strange questions from paying foreigners. My British spouse, however, found it too annoying: "What do you MEAN?" And Mom would say "You know, a red sauce. Like [AmE] spaghetti sauce". But he didn't necessarily know, because naming sauces by colo(u)r seems to be a peculiarly monocultural thing. 

red sauce

Red sauce was only added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in 2005, so its definition is pretty up-to-date and shows the American sense:

(a) n. Any of various sauces that are red in colour, esp. (in the United States) a tomato-based sauce of southern Italian origin; (b) adj. (attributive) U.S. of or designating a type of Italian American cuisine characterized by the use of tomato-based sauces.

Wikipedia tells us:

Red sauce may refer to:

That list demands a translation and a synonym. Marinara sauce in AmE refers to a rather plain tomato sauce for pasta—the default pasta sauce in the US. It is so-called because it was reputedly the kind of simple sauce made or eaten by Neapolitan sailors. In the UK, one sees the word marinara on Italian menus referring to seafood sauces.

An Australian ketchup

brown sauce

The British have brown sauce, of which HP Sauce is the original and most famous example. It's a condiment one buys in a bottle, made with vinegar, fruits, and some form of sugar. It is most often used with breakfast, and we've seen it before in my opus about bacon sandwiches.

Wikipedia's photo at brown sauce

In this vein, Americans have A.1. Sauce, which we never call brown sauce. Since the 1960s, it's been marketed as A.1. Steak Sauce—which points to another American sauce term. Steak sauce, Wikipedia tells us, is:

Image from here

At the Bavard Bar in St Leonard's a few months ago, a Bavardier asked me if I'd noticed the difference between the US and UK meanings of second-guess. I hadn't! She felt that the US meaning was overtaking the UK meaning, but whose meaning is really whose? 

Here's what Oxford Languages says: 

But more than the one meaning is North American. The Oxford English Dictionary lists it, in any meaning, as 'originally and chiefly North American', with evidence of the 'anticipate' sense form 1941 and of the 'judge' sense from 1946. 

See here for the UK-to-US WotY post.

Time for the 2023 US-to-UK Word of the Year. Before people complain that this word has been in British English too long for it to count as a word of 2023, let me remind you of the criteria for SbaCL WotYs: 

• Good candidates for SbaCL WotY are expressions that have lived a good life on one side of the Atlantic but for some reason have made a splash on the other side of the Atlantic this year. 
• Words coined this year are not really in the running. If they moved from one place to another that quickly, then it's hard to say that they're really "Americanisms" or "Britishisms". They're probably just "internetisms". The one situation in which I could see a newly minted word working as a transatlantic WotY would be if the word/expression referenced something very American/British but was nevertheless taken on in the other country.
• When I say word of the year, I more technically mean lexical item of the year, which is to say, there can be spaces in nominations. 

OK!