[Ronnie Corbett]
In breaking news, police report that an elephant did a ton on the M1.
A police spokesman said that motorists should take drive slowly and treat it as a roundabout.
[/Ronnie Corbett]
To clarify, I didn’t hear ‘O Level’ on The Inbetweeners but on The Young Ones. I just threw it in at the end. In the intro to Inbetweeners I believe he says he’s now going to a comprehensive which was a term I didn’t understand.
Ma’ puzzler hurts! 
----- Actually I do understand, its just so much more confusing than K-12!
A couple posts mention jobs. Do UK employers actually require specific primary school (not college) records when you apply? Because in America, other than asking if you have or don’t have a High School diploma, nobody ever asks anything more about non-college education.
And in The Inbetweeners, did the main kid with the glasses (haven’t seen enough to remember names yet) actually have sex with that hot blond girl in a previous episode? What was the deal with that?
And the Hogshead line was a Grampa Simpson quote.
A comprehensive is just a state school, as opposed to what Yanks would call a private school which he previously attended. To make matters more confusing we usually call private schools ‘public schools’. As for employers, it’s usually just GCSEs (from secondary school), A-Levels (from sixth form/colleges) and any higher education (from universities).
No, he messed it up by failing to… find the main event, so blondie figured out that he’d been bullshitting about his previous experience.
Um, ok. Why on Earth do you do that?!?
I might be way off, but I think it’s to do with the Public Schools Act of 1868 which defined these types of schools in law. Why they called the act this in the first place I’ve no idea.
They called the act that because that’s what the schools were already called, and had been since the middle ages. “Public” in this sense means that they’re open for the public to attend (these days for a fee) rather than restricted to a particular family or trade.
I think it’s slightly misleading to say that “we usually call private schools ‘public schools’”. Privately-funded schools are usually called, well, private schools, or independent schools. ‘Public school’ is a vague term which refers to a number of old, prestigious independent schools, traditionally often boys-only boarding schools, although this is changing. As you may imagine, these schools charge very high fees and you have to be pretty well-off to send your kids to one.
To this day, many prominent people in British life are the products of ‘public’ schools. Tony Blair, for example, attended Fettes College in Scotland. And if you go back a few decades, half the British cabinet seemed to be ex-Etonians or Harrovians or whatever. Well, if you look at Tory cabinets, although there were always a few posh people on the Labour side too.
I thought the term public school was meant to differentiate from being educated privately at home with a tutor, which is what was common way back when (at least among the wealthy who could afford a private tutor).
In real Cricket too, a ton is used to describe 100 runs (more commonly called a century)…
Regarding my confusing over ton for 100 mph, I have quite often heard it used as a verb (it only just clicked the other day). I often hear “he was really tonning it down the road”.
We don’t call education before college ‘primary’.
From 11 years old to 15 years old you do secondary education (high school) which ends in your GCSE’s (only the last two years is specifically geared towards the GCSE’s though). You’ll do up to around 8-10 GCSE’s, though you can do less or more depending on how well you’re doing. These count towards getting into college, which you attend at 16-17. You normally do 4 AS Levels at college, then probably drop 1 subject and focus on 3 A Levels (AS is basically ‘half an A Level’ an utterly pointless new certificate in my opinion). You generally need Math and English GCSE’s to get into college, though they often let you sit those subjects again whilst you’re there if you failed them at high school.
The A levels you do at college then set you up for University. Employers will generally only look at the highest education you did. If you have A Levels then it is implied that you have GCSE’s so they most likely won’t want to check up on those.
I know I’m a little late to the party (and I may have missed another USian who pointed it out already)…
But here in the US, we do have the “ton” = “a lot” usage, as well. A couple of the posts from our British members in this thread have made it seem like they presume that we a) don’t know what the standard definition of a ton is, and b) have no knowledge of its slang usage, meaning “a whole bunch”.
Rest assured, the ton as a unit of weight (2000 lbs) is still alive and well here, as that’s how we rate the carrying capacity of our pickup trucks, as well as the gross vehicle weight of our larger, commercial trucks. “To weigh a ton” is still slang for anything that is very heavy, and if you need an even larger colloquial measurement, there’s always the “shit-ton”, or in extreme cases, the “metric shit-ton”.
And in other slang usage, we are plenty familiar with the use of “ton” or “tons” to mean “a lot”. “Love you tons” would not be a weird, foreign expression to American ears.
As for the use of “ton” to mean 100, that’s only familiar to me from watching darts on TV in the past. And since that’s a special case, I’m not sure I would have picked up on that line from The Inbetweeners. But in most other possible uses of the word “ton”, it’s a standard feature of American English.
(“Ton” is also one of those words that the more you see it written out, or the more you say it to yourself, the stranger it gets…)
Yeah, but in British English the spelling is normally tonne and tonnes.
I don’t know…the people holding up the signs in the crowd at the televised darts tournaments definitely spelled it “ton”. And I’d bet dollars to doughnuts (pounds to scones?) that those fans were all very British.
“Tonne” means 1000kg, very close to the 2240 lbs of the British ton. But the North American ton is only 2000lbs.
Canada too, as in “I’ve got a ton of work to do,” or “I’ve got tons of pennies in a jar at home.”
Are you not a year out on these? It always used to be 11 - 16, at which point you do GCSEs, then 16 - 18 for A levels. I suppose a few people who are young for their school year (i.e. birthday July/August) would fit your age range.
That’s plausible; I was JMB.
First and only time I’d heard that one…
???
It’s an exam board, as referenced by amarone and Springtime for Spacers, the Joint Matriculation Board. The boards control their curricula and exams, with the result that pupils taking nominally the same qualification in the same year would study and sit very different papers. They used to be geographically limited IIRC, but that doesn’t seem to be the case now.
Wikipedia has more than you’ll ever need to know if you’re curious.