I didn't look it up anywhere, but I think it could actually be Americanized German. "Santa" is fairly straight forward, but I think Claus, is phonetically, "Clous". Maybe?

Much peace

Khadijah

,no? (at least where it isn't intentional). And it's a word most have learned verbally rather than visually, so they don't argue with their spell checker. The pronunciation doesn't change for me, does it for you? (It would have for one of my aunts, married to one of my father's brothers, but she was from central Texas, and therefore had a German accent, of course.)

A few nights ago I received an email from someone who liked a story I posted on FM. It took some effort to send it because, though I have on some stories there, I hadn't included my address on that one (I don't know why she didn't just comment. Really, sometimes I think some don't want to associate with me publicly. IDKY). However, after spending much too little time telling me how nice the story was, she spent a lot, a lot of keystrokes objecting to the sentence: "He lay down right behind me and...", and telling me that geese can't lay down. (Yeah, she actually used that.) Well the phrase referred to a cat, not a goose (and followed the sentence, "Bagheera was stalking me along the back of the couch, purring as he came.") and though geese can't lay down, cats could - back then. Also, there were quite a few typos and cupertinos in that posting, and maybe even more comma errors (I keep changing my mind on them every time I look at it.)(I think they grow like a fungus on whatever I write.), but she chose that to pick on?? So at least the "clause" thing is correct. Way too many prescriptivist complaints just aren't.