Jeez, some alternative facts from Merriam Webster right there 😂 I’ve never heard a British English speaker (or speakers of any other UK English variant, for that matter) use ‘fall’ to denote a season.

A reputable news source, though, or NewsCorpse/Sky/Ch 9?

I checked the ABC News website, and they’re calling him “MAGA Influencer”, which I’ll accept.

Pique vs peak. Discrete vs discreet. Pallet vs palette vs palate. The list is endless, and I’ve been seeing it more and more frequently, even from “journalists” published in major newspapers.

The other day I saw someone put a comma after “dear” in the salutation “Dear [name],”.

TIL I ovulate every Sunday 😂😅

I still think it’s cute, too, I just wish it was better executed 😏

And the bow goes between the bridge and the fingerboard, not the bridge and the tailpiece. This image is the string player’s equivalent of an AI picture of a person with 6+ fingers on each hand 🤦‍♀️

No flood risk, no bushfire risk and it gets decent rainfall.

As a fellow Australian - where the heck did you find this unicorn of a location?! I’ve been house-hunting (well, land-hunting, really) for over a year, and everything seems to come saddled with a bushfire overlay, flood overlay, or both. I’ve pretty much resigned myself to being stuck in a bushfire zone.

(Note: not asking for you to dox yourself with the actual location, though I am deeply curious.)

Yeah, I tend to use “staff” or sometimes “waitstaff” to describe them, particularly in cafes, where the owner and/or manager might also be waiting tables. “Waiter” or “waitress” I’d mostly use when recounting something that happened while eating out, and I’m trying to specify who’s who in the story.

Hmmm, well, the “wait” in waiter/waitress/waitstaff refers to the act of serving someone, usually in a restaurant or cafe. (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/wait-on?topic=providing-and-serving-meals.) Like a lot of words in English, “wait” has more than one meaning.

There’s nothing wrong with “server”, per se, other than that we already had an established set of words for that role, and a server was also an existing word for a piece of IT equipment prior to US vernacular shifting (somewhere between the 90s and the 2010s, I think - we’ve always had a lot of US media pumped into Australia, but the vocab used to align on this one when I was a kid, and then at some point it changed).

Not saying Americans should do things the way we do it (vive la difference), just that the linguistic shift still throws me off. It would probably confuse me less if you’d always called them servers.

Of all the American vernacular for job titles, “server” is probably the one that makes my poor Aussie brain glitch most frequently. While you’re wondering why people are bringing you a meal in the office, I’m looking at the same sentence and wondering why diners are being forced to work as sysadmins over dinner.

CommBank winning the Big 4’s race to the bottom yet again? The only thing that surprises me about this is that people still bank with them when credit unions and building societies exist 🙄 (The only exception would be international students, backpackers and working holidaymakers, because I hear CommBank’s probably the easiest institution for foreign nationals to set up an account.)

I rate Italo Disco, but the rest of their roasts are very much meh. Plus they’re pricey af - I only buy from them during Black Friday sales, and three of the last four years they’ve got my order wrong (missing or incorrect items) and I’ve had to contact them to fix it. Sometimes more than once.

All good! There’s probably far more people in your boat than mine; it was a pretty natural conclusion to draw 🙂

This interpretation is solid. I’ve lived in various regions over about a 2000km span of the east coast, and noticed usage varies a bit depending on where you are.

(Kind of jarring when you find yourself talking cross purposes with someone of the same nationality and almost identical accent - like when I moved to Qld and discovered some people up there have a very different interpretation of the word “toey” from what we do down south… 😅 )

No one needs the internet outside of work.

As someone with a disability (and no car), the internet has played a massive role in allowing me to live independently, which in turn has a profoundly positive impact on my mental health. There are a wide variety of circumstances in which the internet has enhanced life experience - let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Yeah, I think “dinged” and “bingle” are pretty interchangeable. And a hospital trip from a prang is probably more for whiplash or a sprain - not broken bones in traction or being admitted to ICU… You can definitely have an injury-free prang, though, I agree.

Feel like a bingle is more like when you reverse into a pole or scratch the bumper, or maybe rear end/reverse into another vehicle at <10km/h. Prangs require panel beating and maybe a trip to the hospital.

From Banksy’s 2004 book Cut It Out. Banksy, in turn, ‘got’ it (in its original form) from Sean Tejaratchi’s 1999 essay in his Crap Hound zine. 😅

Ahhh, yeah, that’s a bit cooked. The freedom warriors bit isn’t surprising, though. You’d expect them to be in favour of “the freedom to be as irresponsible as you like”.

Wait, are you saying BAC while driving must be 0.00 in some parts of the States, or am I misunderstanding? It’s 0.05 in most (all?) parts of Australia (except if you’re in a restricted licence category). It’s not encouraged, but it’s legal.

Figured you guys would have more permissive laws than we do.