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PSA: if you're an international organisation, or running an international event, using seasonal markers like "late spring" to describe when something will happen is profoundly confusing for at least some of your audience
please don't do this
try using month names instead
please don't do this
try using month names instead
seasons are a bad way to describe things for many reasons:
1) the northern and southern hemispheres experience inverse weather patterns - when it's hot in one place it's generally cold in the other
2a) some countries, like Australia and Russia, understand seasons meteorologically (i.e. they begin and end uniformly in three month blocks, starting on the 1st of a month) rather than astronomically (calculating from solstices/equinoxes)
2b) so even then, flipping seasons by hemisphere doesn't work all the time (e.g. for most of June, Australia is in "winter" but the US is in "spring", not "summer")
3) some places don't experience four seasons - they have six, or two, or a different number - and may use names that don't conform to the "Western" seasons because the world is a sphere and cultures have different relationships to their places and [insert human history here]
anyway, this complaint about using seasons as a stand-in for "time of year" in international contexts is not new, but it's still relevant and it's still frustrating - and it still alienates a chunk of an international audience when organisations/events do it
if you're doing comms for an international thing, *please* just use month names
they're nowhere near as ambiguous, and have the added benefit of making way more people feel included in your audience
kthxbai
they're nowhere near as ambiguous, and have the added benefit of making way more people feel included in your audience
kthxbai
