Tonight we set our clocks back to return to standard time, and as such here’s a discovery I made through Twitter: according to this tweet, it’s only in 1895 that Melbourne joined Sydney on GMT+10, which is indeed Sydney’s “true” time zone (GMT+10’s central meridian, 150°E, runs through the middle of Sydney). Before that, Melbourne time ran 20 minutes behind …
On Quora, I once answered a question about why Australian and NZ English sound more like “British English” (really, the questioner meant the accents of southeast England) than Canadian English does. At the time I answered, a lot of the other answers were along the lines of “Canada is sooooo diverse and Australia isn’t so that’s why”, even though in reality the …
Jessica Smith is a left-wing feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also very interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.