Jones Brig Partch

After waking up at 3:00 in the morning to catch our flight out here, I was pretty exhausted by the time we went to bed at 11:00 last night (which, granted, is only 9:00 MST). We had a pretty good night's rest but I was still awfully tired when we headed out in the morning. We wanted to check out some of the schools we were interested in before meeting up with our real estate agent to look at more houses.

As we were leaving one elementary school we made a wrong turn or something (we have made an astounding number of wrong turns the past couple of days) and headed into a lovely wooded park area: Jones Bridge Park. 

"Oooh, there's a park nearby. That's nice to know," I said, then read the sign: "Jones Brig Partch."

I hoped Andrew wouldn't notice my pronunciation, but he did and immediately started teasing me.

"Jones Brig Partch?! How did you even come up with that?" he chuckled.

"Easy!" I retorted. "I kept the voicing but switched the phonemes. It's a perfectly logical spoonerism, okay?!"

Instead of the consonant cluster /dʒ/ in bridge, I used the simple /k/ from park, but with the original voicing that /k/ turned to a /g/. Then instead of the simple /k/ in park, I took the /dʒ/ from bridge but devoiced it so it ended up as /tʃ/.

Cross multiply and divide, carry the one and...

/'brɪdʒ/ to /'brɪg/

/'pɑrk/ to /'pɑrtʃ/

Perfectly logical, see?

We spent the rest of the day purposely swapping syllables when reading any sign with the word "bridge" on it (there are a lot of bridge names around here (and we did a lot of driving)). 

Fairly late in the afternoon (and after getting turned around several times), we were following our real estate agent to yet another house, but a car managed to squeeze in between us (something that happens often here; the traffic is crazy, which I'm pretty anxious about but I'll learn to deal with it). It was a similar-ish SUV, though, so when Andrew was in the middle of teasing me ((again) by purposely mixing up the syllables on a bridge sign) and the SUV in front of us put on its blinker and turned into an apartment complex, Andrew put on his signal and turned into the complex as well.

"Guess this is a shortcut or something," he remarked and then his eyes got all big and he said, "Oh, no!"

"What?" I asked (I wasn't paying close attention to the road; I was passing things back to Alexander, who is so tired of getting into and out of the vehicle). 

"THIS IS NOT HER!" Andrew sputtered. "I'm following the wrong car!"

"Let me get this straight," I said. "You've been tailing the wrong car while teasing me for switching up a couple of syllables?!"

We had pull over in the parking lot while we laughed so hard we cried. When we finally pulled back into the street again we got behind a car that had a bumper sticker of a dolphin with the word DOLPHIN on it, only it was spelled DOLVIN (which I guess is an elementary school around here—the Dolvin Dolphins) and we just about died laughing again because they switched the voicing for the /f/ in dolphin!

And...IT ISN'T EVEN THAT FUNNY, but here I am cracking up as I'm typing.

After I made my fateful error this morning, Andrew asked how I could still be so tired that I'd misread such a simple sign. A) He didn't get up to nurse a baby last night (I did); and B) he's currently asleep on the bed—fully clothed because he fell asleep reading—and I'm sitting here more or less wide awake, typing away.

So I guess we're both pretty worn out from the past couple of days (and, you know, decade or so of living in general).