A less heartwarming tutoring story:

I was trying to make my 8th grade boy guess what the prefix "sub-" meant. (I don't do much with prefixes and suffixes as a rule; it's SAT stuff and not as practical for kids who are struggling just to read fluently, but it happened to come up.)

"Tell me some words that start with 'sub-,'" I said.

"Submarine...subway..."

"And what do a submarine and a subway have in common?"

"They both start with sub?"

"Okay, what's a submarine?"

"A boat that goes underwater."

"And what's a subway?"

"It's a place to eat."

Ooh, I was hatin' on LA at that moment.

Now one more kid in the land of the car knows that a subway is a train that goes underground. Go me. Or something.

Grr.

***

In other LA news, I forgot to mention that I've now been to Reseda. As in:

"You are going to Reseda to make love to a model from Ohio whose real name you don't know"

or, more relevantly,

"You live in Los Angeles, and you are going to Reseda. We are all, in one way or another, going to Reseda someday, to die."

Just another LA moment.