While pre-tripping the bus this morning, the instructor was going over all the points that we have to go over when we go to take our CDL skills test. Based on the way that she said some of the words, I could tell that she’d never really paid attention to how the spelling correlates to the pronunciation. When we were going over steering system components, she kept talking about the “Carter pins” and “Tire rod”. Now I’m just taking a stab in the dark here, but I think she meant to refer to cotter pins, and the tie rod. The tire rod is something you use to hit people over the head with, at least in my book. My personal favorite, though, was when we were talking about the flexible couplings in the drive shaft. She kept talking about “cuff links”. It was all I could do to hold back some very mean comments, not that she would have understood why I was making fun of her.