(BON-fyre)

Means: A big outdoor fire, the kind you stand around with a beer on a cold night.

Etymology: It's literally a bone fire. In Middle English it was spelled banefyre or bonefire, and a word list from the 1480s defines it in Latin as ignis ossium, "a fire of bones." Medieval midsummer fires really did burn animal bones along with the wood. The spelling drifted to bon, and people later assumed it came from French bon, "good." It didn't.

"Happy Halloween. Hand out the candy, then meet us at Dave's. He's got the bonfire going and won't say what he's burning."

Second Empire is named for Napoleon III's France in the 1850s and '60s, when Paris was rebuilt with steep, boxy mansard roofs that squeezed a whole extra floor of rooms under the roofline. Americans loved it after the Civil War: tall narrow windows, iron cresting on top, brackets under the eaves, and often a tower. By the 1900s a lot of those houses were old, dark, and run-down, which is how they became Hollywood's go-to haunted house. The Bates house in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) is Second Empire, and Hitchcock reportedly based it on Edward Hopper's painting House by the Railroad.

The first jack-o'-lanterns weren't pumpkins. In Ireland and Scotland, people carved scary faces into turnips and other root vegetables for Halloween and set coals or candles inside. Irish folklore says a drunk named Stingy Jack tricked the devil one too many times, got turned away from both heaven and hell, and has wandered ever since with a coal in a hollowed-out turnip. When Irish immigrants came to America, they found pumpkins were bigger, native, and a whole lot easier to carve. One look at the turnip version and you'll see why they switched.

A wife tells her husband she's got a headache and he should go to the Halloween party without her. An hour later she feels fine, puts on a costume he's never seen, and sneaks in to watch him.

Sure enough, he's dancing with every woman in the room. So she moves in, and one thing leads to another out in the parking lot. She slips home before he does.

When he walks in, she asks how the party was.

"Boring," he says. "Me and the guys played poker in the basement all night. But the guy I lent my costume to said he had the time of his life."

Each sentence hides a Halloween word, running across the spaces between words. Find all five.

1. The big host poured everyone a second round.
2. Tell Emma skip the speeches tonight.
3. I saw it chew through the whole sandwich.
4. Doug raved about the brisket all week.
5. The cab at the curb sat there with its lights off.

Answers in tomorrow's issue.