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.

TIL I ovulate every Sunday 😂😅

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.

A friend of mine (EU national married to an Australian, living in Australia) has given up on trying to ship products from her small online business to the EU. The red tape is apparently a massive headache, and that’s coming from someone who’s familiar with both sides of the equation.

Did I speedrun a midlife crisis in my 20s? 🤔 Never did pickleball, but that’s pretty synonymous with retirees over 60 in my corner of the world.

Asian? I mean, I know they exist in Asia, as I lived in SK and JP when I was younger, but we’ve had them in Australia for as long as I can remember, and I’m in my 40s. Westinghouse, Breville and Philips all offer countertop models, and nowadays you can also get them installed directly into the kitchen sink/counter as part of a water filtration system. (Most people prefer a kettle at home, though - they’re cheaper and less fuss to repair/replace.)