Dear RLW:

You wrote:
>
> US: Are you done?
> Australian: Are you finished?
>
> US: I changed my socks because they had gotten wet in the snow.
> Australian: I changed my socks because they got wet in the snow.
>
There are many interesting regional vocabularies, but those are beyond the scope of Grammar Slammer. The grammar is the same. It is simply a matter of which past tense one uses. Actually, a lot of Americans would say “they got wet.” We have noted that “got” as a past participle is more typical of the Commonwealth (“they had got wet”) but the grammar is the same, and there is mutual comprehension. We have tried to avoid vocabulary issues in Grammar Slammer. That truly requires another work.

One of my personal regional favorites is the expression “redd up.” This is a Yorkshire colloquialism which is used in the novel Jane Eyre. (Charlotte Bronte was from Yorkshire). It is also used in western Pennsylvania in the
United States, but nowhere else in the US. I do not believe it is used elsewhere in the UK. I means to “make ready by cleaning.” Perhaps is it a contraction of “ready” plus “clean up.” At any rate, it is not a grammatical issue but just a curious distinction in vocabulary.