I hear younger british people using it quite a lot but only ever for stand and sit where normally you would use the past continuous. As far as I know it is considered non-standard.
I was doing a lot of business in the UK and Europe back in the early 90s, and the admins in our offices in England would take my powerpoint files and prepare the presentations and handouts (yeah, that used to happen). In the process, they would change everything to standard British spelling and grammar and it would often throw me off as I was trying to give the presentation. I could not get me tongue to spout phrases like “IBM are planning…”
It was during that time, also, that I was in a meeting with my UK colleagues where I was the only American. When one of them calmly said “It appears there is a nigger in the woodpile”, I almost fell off my chair. I told that story we had in a thread about that phrase while back. I had heard it in the US, but never in “polite company” and certainly never in the workplace.
Not nearly as awkward as when Americans introduce themselves by saying “Hi, I’m Randy”.
In most of the US we use “ugly” with weather or other non-living things: “The weather is ugly today.”, “The traffic is ugly today.”
But out West we’d never say the boss was ugly. We would say “The boss’s in an ugly mood today.” But if somebody asked “How’s the boss’s mood?” I might say “It’s ugly” or just “Ugly.”
All in all, that’s not very consistent.
“Ordinary” is like that in Australia (and I don’t think this is a usage that’s made it anywhere else)
If your beer is “pretty ordinary” then it sucks donkey balls and you’re about to pour it down the sink…
For me, the word “okay” is definitely contextual, but in a lot of contexts, it does simply mean “barely passable.” However, tone is important. That said, typically, if I ask someone “how was the concert” and they answer “it was okay” in a normal tone I’m not getting a whole lot of positive vibes out of that. It means that is was decent, but nothing special. I can also imagine it being said in a more “up” tone where the meaning is slightly more passable, but it’s still nothing great.
“Quite” is another word that can convey different levels of approval in different variants of English. When my (Irish) brother was teaching in a (US) university, he returns a student’s paper to him with the written comment “quite good”, meaning better than just “good”. But the (US) student understood it to mean something like “only somewhat good, not as good as it might be”.
That isn’t accurate. “Quite good” is a synonym for “Very good” in U.S. English as well. It is a higher compliment than just “Good”.
Agreed.
Interesting. Possibly the student involved wasn’t American, as I had assumed.
Depends. Where I lived “y’all” depended on context, so I spell the singular as “y’all” and the plural as “ya’all,” pronounced the same, but what do I, a Yankee, know?
My dad grew up 400 miles south of where I did, so he had a lot of unique expressions that I never heard outside my own household. A couple that come to mind:
Turn out the lights (instead of turn off)
My time (instead of “my turn” when playing a board game)
Frolnt room (instead of living room)
Yeah, you can hire a car, or rent it; you can rent or let a house. You wouldn’t hire a house or let a car (actually, I suppose you might hire a holiday cottage for the weekend, but ‘hire’, to me, implies it’s not a serious long term arrangement).
Another local- Bristol, England- language quirk that confused me is the unnecessary addition of the word ‘to’ in sentences like “Where’s that to?”, which simply means “Where’s that?”
Best as I can tell, there are two “nices” in American English: there’s the “short nice”, which is often negative; and there’s the “long nice”, or “niiice”, which is an unequivocal compliment. I bet you said the latter and she heard it as the former.
I use it sometimes - I always thought of it as the passive tense. So:
I was standing at the back.
They stood me at the back.
I was stood at the back.
Granted, I rarely mean I was literally instructed to stand somewhere, more that general consensus dictated it was the right place to be.
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When a South African says they’ll do something “just now”, we don’t really mean “now”. We mean somewhere between “in a little while” and mañana. Immediacy is conveyed by “now-now”
Also, we don’t have any traffic light or signals here. But our intersections are full of robots.
Similarly, I’ve heard that in some Indian dialects, if you ask someone a question and they say “yes”, that doesn’t mean that the answer is “yes”. It just means that they heard and understood your question.
American here, and I don’t quite agree. To me, “quite” can indeed imply “not bad, but I was kinda expecting it to be just a little better.”
I don’t recall encountering that. But there’s a very distinct head wobble that can mean yes, no, or I’m acknowledging that you said something.
In Malaysian English – which is not some sort of bad English, but a true dialect with its own rules – the preposition is often dropped from phrasal verbs.
Example: My Malaysian-born wife often asks me to “throw that [apple core or whatever],” rather than throw it away. Only sometimes do I then chuck the piece of garbage at her. 
Or “Don’t forget to pick Li’l Map!” Choose him from a lineup? Pick away at his scabs? She means pick him up, from school.