Anne, author of the blog Small Town Mommy left a note on the Rams, RAM and Romance post that commented on my use of language.

I love the words you use, it sounds so foreign. I don’t know if it is the Australian or the Canadian, but it sounds so musical.

Of course, the first thing I focused upon was the ‘sounds so foreign’.

This one sentence sent me into what I’m sure is the classic ‘outsider living in another country’ blogger panic. If my words sounded so foreign, did this mean that I wasn’t being vigilant enough and allowing much too much Aussie slang into my blog posts? Would my choice of words mean that a wider audience would not make the effort to read more than the one post they had read, because the words were so foreign: which in my mind obviously means too hard to understand? Was I limiting my audience – and did I even have an audience beyond the few people who had stumbled upon my blog or who had come to visit out of sheer politeness?

Come. Let me show you the inner thoughts that flitter across my mind like an ice skater glides across a smooth expanse of glassy water as I pondered Anne’s comment:

Good grief. Do people in North America really not say things like getting my goat? Stupid question; think about all the weird sayings Clotilde of Chocolate & Zucchini
has been telling us the French say! Of course no one here says get my goat! Hmmmm, now that I think about it, people tend to call rubbish bins trash cans here… yes, that’s a serious oversight, I need to be much more thoughtful on behalf of my North American audience. Voila! Definitely an attempt to suck up to the French Canadian readers who might one day find my blog… I adore the French language and culture. Wish I could speak it fluently. I really need to go to French classes seeing I’m a Landed Immigrant. Lord, I’ve enrolled Bronwen into a French immersion school and I don’t speak the language! Heeeeeeelp!. Bronwen starts school… in…. wait on….six months… SIX MONTHS? How is that possible she was only born a little while ago…. arrrrrrrrrrgh! Maybe this example proves I could be a good entrant into the Ramdon Tuesday Event hosted by Keely at The Un-Mom Blog. I can be really rather random. How did Random Tuesday Event get into… oh yeah. Small Town Mommy.

You get the idea.

But of course, what I should have focused on in the comment left by Anne – what I have seen more fully with my inner sassy self, is that it sounds so musical.

The blogosphere is full of voices, all telling tales, all sharing wisdom and insights; each writer wanting to teach other people something. It can be a cacophony of noise (a little like Twitter!), or it can become a choir of compassion, understanding and sharing. And because Anne and I come from different parts of the world with different experiences, we don’t see things the same way; nor would we want to. In the sea of voices on the blogosphere, an Australian living in Canada is indeed musical, because I don’t say things in quite the same way as anyone else. But each blog writer has a voice that adds a unique colour in the choir…. and phrases are the gift of language to reveal and rejoice in our differences. Because in a few words Small Town Mommy gave me the gift of seeing that my voice is a wonderful part of the choir, and I’m going to sing my heart out!