At 07:06 AM 12/10/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>My favorite is that for some reason in the US at Christmas we burn
>"luminaries".
The real word that some of us use is luminares, plural for luminare. My
boss calls them limners. Maybe he means to burn people in portrait!
If there is one thing to learn from the internet, it is that English is a
complex language and American English is a bewilderment. Throw in the
imbeciles that speak it, correctly or not, and now you know why the world
is wacko.