The long-standing debate over how to pronounce...

The long-standing debate over how to pronounce Los Angeles moved Otis Wade of Silver Lake to recall an attempt by the L.A. school system to teach the Spanish version ( loce AHNG-hayl-ais ).

“It was 1912 or thereabouts,” he said. “A teacher at my Selma Avenue Grammar School was assigned the duty.”

Poor woman. She faced an unexpected obstacle-- hayl sounded close to hell .

“Now in those wonderful bygone days one did not utter hell in the presence of children,” Wade said. “She explained that it wasn’t hell that we were saying, etc., etc. But word got back to the parents that hell had been uttered in the classroom. That did it--or ended it. No further efforts were made to give Los Angeles its proper pronunciation.”

Memories were also stirred by our item about the Santa Monica postal employees whose job is taping dimes to stamp books (the office’s machines can’t make change). Ken Rosenhek of Beverly Hills remembered that he once worked for a research firm that taped 25-cent pieces to the questionnaires it sent to car owners to encourage their return.

One day Rosenhek arrived at his office to find that the next round of mail--2,000 letters with pre-attached quarters--had been stolen. They were traced to a lower-echelon employee “who evidently couldn’t pass up the temptation,” said Rosenhek. “When the police showed up at his house, his kids were unsticking the quarters from the envelopes.”

Is Cocola the real thing? Coca-Cola thinks it’s close enough.

The giant soft-drink manufacturer recently threatened to sue the trendy downtown eatery unless the latter changed its name. So . . . goodby Cocola. And hello, Boyd Street Grill.

“We don’t understand it,” said Wendy Davis, co-owner of the restaurant, a hangout for artists. “We’ve been open more than three years and now they take notice? But we like the publicity. Maybe we should have changed the name to Pepsi.”

Cocola, she explained, is simply “an Italian term of endearment. It means something like ‘my little sweetie.’ ”

One thing Davis won’t change is the soft-drink selection.

“We’ve never served Cokes,” she said, “just 7-Up and RC Cola.”

The scene shows a woman taking a shower as a stranger approaches. She screams. The camera zooms in on the water going down the drain.

An excerpt from the film, “Psycho”? Nope--a Department of Water and Power TV ad.

A voice warns ominously that if you waste water, your bill “will be a shock.”

Geez, the water police are getting scary.

miscelLAny:

Well, it was one of those Italian cities . . .

Naples, a community in Long Beach, has canals that are plied by gondoliers. The other Naples has neither.