PG notes that the OP is dated in mid-2021, so he cannot judge the current state of British slang.
From EF.com:
If there’s one essential thing you need to get a firmer grasp on UK culture, it’s knowledge of the slang words Brits can’t stop using. Just imagine one day arriving in London and looking super strange because you can’t communicate with the locals. IMAGINE! Luckily, I’m here to teach you six common British terms you can’t live without.
1. Bagsy
The equivalent to shotgun in US English, this is what you say when you’re claiming something before everyone else, like the front seat of the car or the last scone (if you don’t know what a scone is, Google it and then sit in shame for a while. Then find a recipe for scones and make some).
. . . .
7. Uni
Want to study at a university in the UK? Make sure you’re calling it by the right name. In Britain, college means something totally different to what it means in the US, where it’s another word for university. UK colleges are for students aged between 16 and 18, who graduate from there to go to university, which is shortened to just uni. If you don’t get it right, you might end up studying in the wrong place and with people 2 years younger than you. How embarrassing!
8. Gutted
Didn’t get into the uni you wanted to go to? You’re probably really disappointed and upset – otherwise known as gutted. Where this comes from is anyone’s guess, but it probably has something to do with the sad feeling you get in your gut when you’re upset.
Link to the rest at EF.com
PG notes that “Gutted” in the US has a somewhat different meaning and there’s little doubt in PG’s mind of the source of the term outside a major metropolitan area in the United States.
After you finish fishing in rural Missouri or Minnesota (and many other places), nobody “cleans” the fish they caught. They “gut” them. Ditto for the deer you just shot. (No, it’s not Bambi’s mother.)
Without going into excruciating detail, gutting a fish involves making a long cut on the bottom of the fish, then removing the fishy parts that are not, at least in the United States, regarded as edible.
Fish shouldn’t require a gut hook. Field dressing the deer you just shot is a little bigger job. Again, without going into detail, some hunters prefer a knife with a “gut hook” blade to speed things along.
To be clear, American English includes other meanings for gut that are a bit closer to the apparent British English usage. “That took guts.” or “That was a gutsy thing for her to do.” are a couple of examples of the use of the term referring to humans, not dead creatures.
There are colleges for 16-18 year olds in England where students study full-time for A (advanced) levels; they are more correctly called sixth-form colleges — and are few and far between as the majority of secondary schools (meaning state schools — not public schools) — which, confusingly, are now termed acadamies — have sixth-form classes. There are also colleges, which were originally and ostensibly intended to provide skills based learning for 16-18 year olds whose students attended while in employment (e.g. as an apprentice or trainee) on a day-release basis. Such colleges were formally referred to as technical colleges or colleges of further education, but colloquially known as techs. Techs also provided evening classes in A-level subjects and this provision was commonly known as night school. And, there were also colleges of higher education, many of which offered a two-year full-time diploma and some of which offered three-year full-time degrees. Most, if not all, of these colleges of higher education have now been taken over by a university. Some specialist colleges still survive and thrive, e.g. agricultural and veterinary colleges.
To add to the confusion many English universities are collegiate and many alumni refer to the college they attended rather than the university, e.g. Caius, St Hilda’s, Magdalen etc.
So, an everyday conversation in the UK may go, “What did you do in sixth-form?”
“Didn’t do sixth-form, went to tech and did general building on day release and night school for me A-level English.”
“And uni?”
“Didn’t go to uni, went to college and got a Dip. H.E. and a B.A. Hons. And then uni for me M.A.. Grizedale.” Grizedale being a reference to a college within a university.
I’ve witnessed a few English conversations like that, B. English is only a semi-common language shared by Britain and America.
Yeah, it can be fun. If you tell a Yank you did grad school at the University of London, the only time they care is if it was the London School of Economics (if, that is, said Yank knows that LSE is part of the University of London). But there’s a big prestige† difference between an M.Phil. (a degree we don’t have — it’s not the same thing as an M.A.) from Imperial, from Queen Mary, or from Birkbeck, and a Brit will directly ask.
† And unless one is inside of academia, that’s the only aspect that matters; the various colleges at ULondon, and for that matter at Oxford and Cambridge, have maintained their prestige pecking order unaltered for the last seven decades, despite the “inside academia” primacy of some over others, especially in certain fields (compare the baseline politics/government/history grad from Birkbeck to one from Imperial any day, despite the prestige problems with Birkbeck).
The distinction made in 7 is misleading. It describes what it means “to go to college” correctly and then fumbles the rest. The University of London, for example, consists of nearly two dozen colleges, with some significant overlap among them; one can study law at Queen Mary, at the London School of Economics (which is a “college”), at King’s College, and so on. This is distinct from the US practice in which a subject-area is a college “within” a university, such as a College of Law, a College of Medicine, a College of Arts and Letters, and a College of Engineering, all of which may be found at a certain university in Pasadena better known for its gridiron-football team than anything else.
That there are “colleges” for 16-18 year olds, substituting largely for the US freshman year (the bachelor’s degree in England is ordinarily a three-year in-residence course of study), doesn’t mean that’s the correct meaning of “college” in all contexts.