Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Other: Fun With Phonetics

I was driving out to the PetSmart after work because (a) by the time I got my butt motivated to leave this morning, the buses became annoyingly sparse, which mean that (b) I needed to justify driving to work and buying 30 pounds of cat litter will do it and (c) I got totally fed up with the local Petco because I never seemed to spend less than 15 minutes in line, so I refuse to go there anymore. The closest PetSmart is in Tujunga, and even though I'd been there before, I can never remember how to get there. I was using the Google voice navigation on my phone, and among other "quirks," it came up with some interesting pronunciations of street names.

Tujunga Canyon Rd. Ok, although there are many, many streets here with Spanish names, they never get pronounced correctly; they've been, um, anglified. "Tujunga" is an exception or at least close to one, as the 'j' is pronounced like an 'h'. Except the Google lady was using a hard 'j'. "Tuh-jun-ga Canyon Rd." Ok, so eventually I turn onto Foothill. That's a real English word, right? "Fooh-thill." Double fail. Well, I did get there, but still.

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