An Englishman does not wear /suspenders/ and /neckties/, but /braces/ and /cravats/. /Suspenders/ are his wife's garters; his own are /sock-suspenders/. The family does not seek sustenance in a /rare tenderloin/ and /squash/, but in /underdone under-cut/ and /vegetable marrow/. It does not eat /beets/, but /beet-roots/. The wine on the table, if miraculously German, is not /Rhine wine/, but /Hock/.... The maid who laces the stays of the mistress of the house is not /Maggie/ but /Robinson/. The nurse-maid is not /Lizzie/ but /Nurse/. So, by the way, is a trained nurse in a hospital, whose full style is not /Miss Jones/, but /Nurse Jones/. And the hospital itself, if private, is not a hospital at all, but a /nursing-home/, and its trained nurses are plain /nurses/, or /hospital nurses/, or maybe /nursing sisters/. And the white-clad young gentlemen who make love to them are not /studying medicine/ but /walking the hospitals/. Similarly, an English law student does not study law, but /the/ law.
If an English boy goes to a /public school/, it is not a sign that he is getting his education free, but that his father is paying a good round sum for it and is accepted as a gentleman. A /public school/ over there corresponds to our /prep school/; it is a place maintained chiefly by endowments, wherein boys of the upper classes are prepared for the universities. What we know as a /public school/ is called a /board school/ in England, not because the pupils are boarded but because it is managed by a school board. English school-boys are divided, not into /classes/, or /grades/, but into /forms/, which are numbered, the lowest being the /first form/. The benches they sit on are also called /forms/. The principal of an English school is a /head-master/ or /head-mistress/; the lower pedagogues used to be /ushers/, but are now /assistant masters/ (or /mistresses/). The head of a university is a /chancellor/. He is always some eminent public man, and a /vice-chancellor/ performs his duties. The head of a mere college may be a /president/, /principal/, /rector/, /dean/ or /provost/. At the universities the students are not divided into /freshmen/, /sophomores/, /juniors/ and /seniors/, as with us, but are simply /first-year men/, /second-year men/, and so on. Such distinctions, however, are not as important in England as in America; members of the university (they are called [Pg105] /members/, not /students/) do not flock together according to seniority. An English university man does not /study/; he /reads/. He knows nothing of /frats/, /class-days/, /senior-proms/ and such things; save at Cambridge and Dublin he does not even have a /commencement/. On the other hand his daily speech is full of terms unintelligible to an American student, for example, /wrangler/, /tripos/, /head/, /pass-degree/ and /don/.