What about “plug socket” in reference to mains power? Do UK people who say “jack socket” also say “plug socket”? I just encountered that phrase in a British webcomic.
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A Socket is a receptacle ( like ball and socket on the skeleton, your legs connect to your body)
receptecal “a hollow object used to contain something”
socket “a natural or artificial hollow into which something fits or in which something revolves.”
a PLUG fils a hole.
so you plug into a socket.
Phone Socket ( on wall )
Phone Jack/Plug ( on the cable RJ11/12 or BT)
Plug or Mains “Socket” ( on Wall )
Mains Plug ( on the cable )
Headphone Socket ( on CD player )
Headphone Jack/Plug ( On the headphones)
RJ45 PLUG or JACK fits in an RJ45 socket on a network.
so Plug/Jack get used interchangeably for the most part for the item on the cable. And socket on the fixed building/equipment.
Rob
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In the US I don’t hear “plug socket”. “Wall socket” is common, though inapt when referring to a socket mounted in the floor. Also “AC socket”. (“Mains” is British.)
And in the US I almost never hear “jack” used (by knowledgeable people) to refer to a plug. It refers to the receptacle.
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What about belly-buttons (navels?) Are the terms “innie” and “outie” pretty much universal throughout the former empire?
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this reminds me of this interview
timecode 3:40----
Note i hate Jonathan Ross
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There are so many differences…
I think here in the UK we know of most of these differences and don’t have an issue with them… If you said AC socket to someone they may clarify but would have a good idea.
Just as if you said Jelly they would not necessarily give you a gelatin ( or substitute) fruit pudding but would ask if you wanted a fruit pudding or a fruit preserve for your toast.
Certainly if I worked in a UK electronics retailer, and someone walked in and simply asked for a 1/4" jack then they would get a plug.
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From posting and reading here I’ve trained myself to use the terms jack and plug, for instance I’ve been talking about banana plugs and jacks, and 6.35mm mono plugs and jacks, substituting the word jack for the British word socket. In the UK it’s true we talk about jack plugs and jack sockets, so we get a bit confused about American terms like RCA jacks.
It’s a bit like toilet. The term is used in an expansive sense in British English. The entire facility is the toilet, so we’ll talk about the toilet bowl, toilet cistern, men’s and women’s toilets and so on. “I left my phone in the toilet” doesn’t mean we actually dropped it into the bowl. I’ve observed that Americans talk about Men’s rooms, Women’s rooms, and so on, and tend to use the word toilet to signify the apparatus.
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Rest room is the one I hear most frequently over here. Or bathroom
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Bathroom sounds especially odd to me. There’s never a bath in a public bathroom. I happen to have a toilet in my home bathroom, but that’s because the architect decided they had no room for separate bathroom and toilet. Maybe Americans might be confused to hear that there is also a bath in my home bathroom.
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Somewhere there’s an Arnold Schwarzenegger interview with a British talk show host, in which Arnie talks about some of his first friends when he went from London to Hollywood. Emphasizing how intimate that early friendship was, he said that they gave him some silverware. To American ears that’s probably a homely tale about hospitality, but the British host was staggered that this friend gave what sounded like an actual silver service dinner set to him. I could hear this confusion happening in real time, but I didn’t feel that either of them realised they were talking different languages.
In American English as I understand it, silverware is just a commonplace name for everyday cutlery.
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That’s more or less true. So stateside when we read a mystery where there’s a break-in in which the silverware is targeted it doesn’t sound quite as bad to us.
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LOL-not a Jonathon Woss fan? In her defense, since it was him asking she may have thought he was asking “what do you do if you have to pull over and take a reeree?” (I don’t think that has a meaning in any dialect.)
Edit: to any Americans who think I’m being horrible, Johnathon Ross doesn’t have a speech impediment so much as an accent that such a small fraction of the British population uses that RP speakers frequently patronize the minority.
Does “Knob” have any other meanig in the US?
There are a lot of thread comments that say “I Like big Knobs” and not sure if that’s understood in all the ways we in the UK would see it.
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We who live in the US generally know about the double meaning. 
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His Twitter handle is wossy.
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So we say…
Plug In ( the act of putting a plug in a socket )
So what about this phrase… that’s common AV Slang…
Jack In??
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Not where I grew up. It reminds me a bit of the Futurama episode where Bender gets addicted to electricity which is delivered through a jack in his head. Leela yells through the bathroom door. “Are you jacking on in there?” “No! Don’t come in!”
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It’s not just language. I used to love watching American one-handed eating etiquette. I imagine the European style is equally bewildering to Americans.
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Obviously I meant knife and fork.
Though this stirs a memory of the first hamburgers we saw in my home town in the early sixties. There was some confusion as to whether to pick it up and bite chunks off or to use a knife and fork.
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