1. I had a “throw-back”/deja-vu moment last night when I came out of the movie theatre into an only partly familiar, cold, dark, half-deserted carpark. The atmosphere—the cold, the darkness, the emptiness, and the fact that there was a certain indefinable aroma in the weather—took me back to Newfoundland. It didn’t trigger a particular place or event that I can actually recall, but just momentarily I was not sure when and where I was. Weird.
2. Tassie is a place, and an Aussie is a person. It’s always struck me as odd that these two words seem alike, yet we don’t use “Aussie” to describe Australia, and “Tassie” to describe a person from Tasmania. I guess this means that “Tassie” is short for Tasmania, but “Aussie” is short for Australian.
I actually saw someone refer to Australia as Aussie the other day. (And I immediately thought of you mentioning this particular issue before.)