Well technically, we call it "grade 8" rather than "8th grade" (and that I slip up here is a tell that I'm a foreigner) and it's technically "secondary school" but I don't hear people call it that. High schoolers don't have cutsey names for the grades. They're just... in grade 8, in grade 12, etc. This is in Canada.
They don't refer to "senior year"? I don't think of that as cutesy at all — just descriptive. Do you refer to university by these 'cutesy' names? Or is it grade 13-16?
This is a very American thing. Here in New Zealand, you just refer to the year you're in. No one says "freshman" (whatever that means), or "senior". It's just "I'm in year x". Same at university - I don't know what all the names you give your years refer to exactly, and doesn't it get confusing between 3, 4 and 5 year programmes of study?
It doesn't get confusing during undergrad, since pretty much everyone is in a 4-year program. Graduate schools are different: in law school are a 1L/2L/3L, most masters programs are first-year or second-year (since there are no other years), and PhD programs often don't use years because people take different amounts of time to finish.
But in undergrad, it's all pretty standardized, at least in my experience.
Caveat, my kid is still in elementary school, and I don't really interact with high schoolers yet.
In my time in university here, I didn't hear that language being used. Wikipedia tells me that Canadians use "first year" to indicate its first year students, but "frosh week" is a thing. I did my undergrad in the US, though. Even there, if I ever heard somebody say "sophomore," it would have come from the mouth of a confused freshman.
Can I ask what region you went to college in? I'm familiar with schools in several regions (went to college in PA and graduate school at a UC) and people regularly used these terms IME. I'm curious to know where they're not used (or if this is a more recent development — I graduated law school 15 years ago).
